Figures of Speech: Picturing Proverbs in Renaissance Netherlands 9780520945661, 9780520259546

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Chapter 1 A Passion for Proverbs
Chapter 2 The Proverb Portrayed
Chapter 3 From Hay to Turnips: The Curious Career of a Bosch Invention
Chapter 4 Loquacious Pictures: Twelve Emblematic Proverb Engravings
Chapter 5 The Battle for the Breeches: A Proverb in the Making
Conclusion Figures of Fun and Folly
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

figures of speech

A H M A N S O N • M U R P H Y F I N E

A R T S

I M P R I N T

   has endowed this imprint to honor the memory of       

.

   

who for half a century served arts and letters, beauty and learning, in equal measure by shaping with a brilliant devotion those institutions upon which they rely.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Art Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from the Ahmanson Foundation.

figures of speech picturing proverbs in renaissance netherlands

.,

walter s. gibson

university of california press Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2010 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gibson, Walter S.   Figures of speech : picturing proverbs in renaissance Netherlands / Walter S. Gibson.—1st ed.    p.   cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978-0-520-25954-6 (cloth : alk. paper)   1.  Proverbs in art.  2.  Art, Renaissance— Netherlands.  3.  Art, Renaissance—Belgium.  4.  Art, Netherlandish.  I.  Title.   n7780.g53  2010   760'.0446—dc22

2009031956

Manufactured in the United States of America 19  18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11  10 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

In memory of Elaine C. Block

contents ., List of Illustrations  /  ix Preface  /  xiii chapter 1

A Passion for Proverbs  /  1 chapter 2

The Proverb Portrayed  /  18 chapter 3

From Hay to Turnips: The Curious Career of a Bosch Invention  /  39 chapter 4

Loquacious Pictures: Twelve Emblematic Proverb Engravings  /  80 chapter 5

The Battle for the Breeches: A Proverb in the Making  /  118 conclusion

Figures of Fun and Folly  /  142 Notes  /  157 Selected Bibliography  /  215 Index  /  229

illustrations .,

1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Netherlandish Proverbs, 1559  2 Detail of Fig. 1  3 Detail of Fig. 1  20 Man Crawling through the World, R & K Hours, detail of lower border, ca. 1470–80  22 Man Gaping against the Oven, 1510–25  23 Carrying Fire in One Hand and Water in the Other, ca. 1480  24 Israhel van Meckenem, King David with Proverbial Sayings from the Psalms  25 Jorg Breu, Milking the Ears  26 Various Proverbs, late 15th century  28 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Twelve Proverbs  29 He Who Would Make His Way through the World Must Bend, ca. 1515–20  30 The World Feeds Many Fools, after 1550  31 Three Fools of the Violieren Chamber, Antwerp, 1561  34 Frans Hogenberg, Die Blau Huicke, ca. 1558  36 Hieronymus Bosch, The Field Has Eyes, the Woods Have Ears  40 Hieronymus Bosch, Haywain, triptych  41 Central panel of Fig. 16  42 Triumph of Love, early 16th century  44 Lovers in central panel of Fig. 16  45 Eden panel of Fig. 16  47

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21. 22. 23. 2 4. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 3 2. 33. 3 4. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 4 2. 43. 4 4. 45. 46. 47. 48.

illustr ations

Hell panel of Fig. 16  47 Hieronymus Bosch, Haywain, outer wings  48 Netherlandish School, Haywain,  53 Gillis Mostaert, Haywain,  54 Attributed to Gillis Mostaert, Haywain  55 Frans Hogenberg, Al Hoy, 1559  57 Remigius Hogenberg, The Turnip Wagon  59 Netherlandish, Hay Allegory, ca. 1550  64 Attributed to Adriaen Pietersz Crabeth, Al Hoy  65 Frans Pourbus the Elder, It Is All Hay, 1575  66 After Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Big Fish Eat the Little Fish, 1557  After Pieter Bruegel, Battle of the Savings Pots and Money Chests  Attributed to Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Elck, 1558  72 Jacques Horenbault, Al Hoy, 1608  73 Follower of Sebastian Vrancx, Netherlandish Proverbs  74 Detail of Fig. 35  75 Adriaen van de Venne, Elck is om raepen uyt, 1644  76 Adriaen van de Venne, Elck treckt om ’t langst  77 Al Hoy, title page to Cornelis Udemans, Verkeerde Werelt, 1660  Jan Wierix, Twelve Proverbs  82 Jan Wierix, Drunken Peasant Pushed into a Pigsty, 1568  84 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Falling between Two Stools (detail of Fig. 10)  85 Jan Wierix, The Misanthrope, from the Twelve Proverbs  87 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Misanthrope, 1568  88 Jan Wierix, The Blind Leading the Blind, from the Twelve Proverbs  Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Blind Leading the Blind, 1568  90 Jan Wierix, Man Warming Himself at a Neighbor’s Burning House, from the Twelve Proverbs  91 Jan Wierix, Archer Shooting All His Arrows, from the Twelve Proverbs  92

68 71

78

89

illustr ations

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49. Jan Wierix, Every Merchant Praises His Own Wares, from the Twelve Proverbs  93 50. Jan Wierix, Man Playing the Jawbone, from the Twelve Proverbs  95 51. The Viool Player (detail of Fig. 1)  96 52. Jan Wierix, Drunken Fool Seated on an Egg, from the Twelve Proverbs  97 53. Jan Wierix, Man with Moneybag and Flatterers, from the Twelve Proverbs  99 5 4. Jan Wierix, The Hay Chasing the Horse, from the Twelve Proverbs  100 55. Jan Wierix, The Henpecked Husband, from the Twelve Proverbs  101 56. Netherlandish School, Husband Surrendering His Breeches to His Wife, 1555  104 57. Jan Wierix, Peddler Seated by the Bride, from the Twelve Proverbs  105 58. Jan Wierix, Begging at the Deaf Man’s Door, from the Twelve Proverbs  107 59. Laetet Anguis in Herba, from Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes, 1586  110 60. Page with blank escutcheon, from Johann Theodor de Bry, Emblemata Saecularia, 1596  114 61. Every Merchant Praises His Own Wares, from Johann Theodor de Bry, Emblemata Saecularia, 1611  115 62. Knocking at the Deaf Man’s Door, from Johann Theodor de Bry, Emblemata Saecularia, 1611  116 63. Master of the Banderoles, Struggle for the Breeches, ca. 1450  121 64. Peter Flötner, Mock Religious Procession, 1535  122 65. Florentine School, Struggle for the Breeches, ca. 1450–60  123 66. Master E.S., Ornamental Foliage with the Struggle for the Breeches  125 67. Seven Women beneath the Breeches, Netherlands, ca. 1375–1425  126 68. Frans Hogenberg, Struggle for the Breeches, ca. 1558–60  127 69. Franz Brun, Struggle for the Breeches, 1560  128 70. After Marten de Vos, Struggle for the Breeches  129 71. Priapus, sculptural relief above the entrance to Het Steen  132

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72. Die Blau Huicke, after 1633  134 73. Battle for the Breeches, 17th century  135 74. Battle for the Breeches, from Adriaen van de Venne, Tafereel van de belachende Werelt, 1635  136 75. Adriaen van de Venne, Battle for the Breeches  138 76. Attributed to Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Battle for the Breeches  139 77. Battle for the Breeches, from Johann Theodor de Bry, Emblemata Saecularia, 1611  140 78. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Netherlandish Proverbs, 1559  150 79. Anonymous, Proverbs on Sloth, ca. 1550  151 80. Detail of Fig. 78  152 81. “We Are Seven,” 16th century  155

preface ., The transformation of proverbs and other verbal expressions into visual images has long fascinated artists and their public, but never more than in the Netherlands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This subject has also engaged my attention for some years, resulting in a number of short publications, for the most part listed in the Selected Bibliography. These excursions into proverb imagery have generally been limited to the explication of particular examples, and similar concerns can also be found in the present book, which, in addition, addresses some broader issues. Why were proverb images so immensely popular in these centuries? Did the depiction of proverbs change over time, and if so, how? And why did some proverbs, to the exclusion of others, find such favor with the picture- and print-buying public? Our current understanding of proverb imagery, I fear, does not permit any conclusive answers to these questions. Nevertheless, my first two chapters offer provisional responses, while the three case studies that follow provide insights into the range and diversity of proverb images in Renaissance Netherlands, as well as the ways in which some of them were transformed over time. I have also suggested why certain proverbs or groups of proverbs—and in Chapter five, the mode of depicting a particular proverb—enjoyed widespread currency. Some of the ideas treated in this book appeared in tentative fashion in my short monograph on Pieter Bruegel published in 1977,1 while their various aspects were elaborated in presentations at professional con­

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preface

ferences, among them the 1995 Medieval Conference at Western Michi­ gan University in Kalamazoo, the 2002 International Conference of the Historians of Netherlandish Art in Antwerp, the Sixth Colloquium of the Misericordia International at the University of Sheffield, in 2003, and the annual College Art Association Conference held in Boston in 2006. I have greatly benefited from the resulting discussions on these occasions. I would also like to thank the three readers of the manuscript, especially Barbara C. Bowen and Wolfgang Mieder, who not only sub­ mitted my text to their expert scrutiny but also generously shared their formidable knowledge on topics outside my area of study. Professor Mieder was particularly helpful on matters proverbial. Colleagues and others who were always ready to answer my questions include Edwin Buijsen, Zirka Filipczak, Nancy Kay, Elizabeth Keiffer, A. Monballieu, Takami Matsuda, Yoko Mori, Jeroen Vandommele, and Robert Volz. They all have my warmest thanks, as do Jan Piet Filedt Kok, Malcolm Jones, Eddy de Jongh, Naomi Kline, Jos Koldewij, R. H. Marijnissen, and Kathryn M. Rudy for their help in obtaining visual material. I am also much indebted to Diane Scillia for her valuable assistance at various stages of my research, and to Samuel Y. Edgerton who kindly translated several Latin inscriptions for me. As with several of my past endeavors, the staff of the Library of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massa­ chusetts, provided indispensable support with unfailing cheerfulness and efficiency. Karen Bucky and Bonghee Lis obtained much essential material on interlibrary loan, and Regina Quinn and Laurie Glover guided me through the mysteries involved in the acquisition and storage of digital imagery. My thanks go to them all as well as to Stephanie Fay, Fine Arts Editor at the University of California Press, and her assistant Eric Schmidt, with an extra measure of gratitude to Fronia W. Simpson for her usual thorough and thoughtful copyediting. The late Elaine C. Block has signally increased our knowledge and appreciation of medieval and early modern profane imagery, both through the Misericordia International, the association of which she was

preface

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the founder and long the guiding spirit, and through her many publi­ cations, not least those dealing with proverb imagery. This book is ded­i­ cated to her memory. walter s. gibson

Pownal, Vermont November 2008

chapter one

a passion for proverbs ., Among other things that profit our tong Those which much may profit both old and young Such as on their fruite will feede or take holde Are our common playne, pithy proverbes old. —john heywood, 1546

i In the third book of his Essais, first published in 1588, Michel de Montaigne remarked that had he ever met Erasmus of Rotterdam, he would have taken for proverbs everything that Erasmus said to his servant or his innkeeper’s wife. 1 Montaigne was undoubtedly thinking of Erasmus’s great compilation of proverbs and proverbial expressions, the Adagiorum Chiliades. But had he known Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Montaigne with equal justice might have said the same about him. Indeed, proverbs are nowadays closely associated with Bruegel’s name, and among his proverb pictures the most familiar to us is Netherlandish Proverbs (Fig. 1), a painting of 1559 that depicts a village and the surrounding countryside. This is a veritable proverb country whose inhabitants are literally figures of speech acting out some one hundred or more proverbs, many of which we may still recognize today.2 To mention only a few, in the lower left quadrant (Fig. 2), just inside the tavern, we encounter the fellow who “falls between two stools into the ashes,”3 that is, he cannot make up his mind on a course of action and so misses his opportunity. In the

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a passion for proverbs

figure 1: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Netherlandish Proverbs, 1559. Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie. Photo: Jörg P. Anders. © Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.

courtyard is the woman who “carries fire in one hand and water in the other” (she is “two-faced,” hence inconsistent or untrustworthy). Leaning against the wall is the soldier literally “armed to the teeth” who “bells the cat,” that is, he embarks on a potentially dangerous enterprise, alluding to the old tale of the mice, none of whom volunteers to place a warning bell on their mortal enemy. 4 Nearby is the man who “butts his head against the wall,”5 and just across the barnyard, at the extreme left, is a man biting a pillar: he is a pilaarbijter, or “pillar biter,” a hypocrite or bigot. Not far away is the housewife who is so mean and spiteful that she can tie the devil to a pillow.6 Just around the corner, on the other side of the wall, are two seated men, one shearing a sheep, the other clipping a pig, the latter creating “much squeal but little wool,” which is said of those who boast of doing much but achieve little.7 To the right of this pair, a woman drapes a blue cloak over an older man: she is the adulterous wife

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3

figure 2: Detail of Fig. 1.

who makes her husband a cuckold, to use an old English expression. Farther to the right (Fig. 1), one man “fills the well after the calf has been drowned” (formerly we might “lock the barn door after the horse has been stolen,” an expression that also appears in several collections current in Bruegel’s day.)8 Another “casts roses before swine,” inspired by Christ’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:6: “Neither cast ye your pearls before swine lest they trample them under their feet”). Farther to the right, an elegant youth “spins the world on his thumb” (we might say “the world is his oyster”),9 someone else “puts a spoke in another’s wheel,” and behind them, another hypocrite “puts a flaxen beard on Christ,” while just beyond them, an anxious man “sits on hot coals.” In addition to this surreal landscape, Bruegel depicted proverbs in other works, ranging from his early designs for prints, including Big Fish Eat the Little Fish and Elck (see Figs. 31, 33), through the Twelve Proverbs (see

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a passion for proverbs

Fig.10), to such late paintings as The Misanthrope and The Blind Leading the Blind (see Figs. 44, 46), as well as the enigmatic Peasant and the Nest Robber.10 Neither this passion for proverbs nor depictions of them were unique to Bruegel. As perspicacious an entrepreneur as he was supremely gifted as an artist, Bruegel was exploiting a long-held interest in proverbs that peaked precisely during his lifetime. We use proverbs every day, often without being particularly aware of doing so, but what exactly are they? A recent dictionary of literary terms defines the proverb as “a short pithy saying that embodies a general truth. . . . Common to most nations and peoples, it is a form of expression of great antiquity.”11 This pretty much fits our commonsense under­ standing of proverbs: they are old, they are often picturesque in phrase, and they include such familiar advice as “A stitch in time saves nine” and “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch,” as well as often wry observations on human affairs, such as “Birds of a feather flock together,” “Once bitten, twice shy,” and “A fool and his money are soon parted.”12 Earlier centuries would have accepted such homely advice as proverbs. An ancient Greek handbook on rhetoric defines proverbs as brief sayings compressing “much meaning into a few words,” for example, “Know yourself ” and “Follow God.”13 The fifteenth-century architect and writer Leon Battista Alberti calls them “veiled sayings” that “seem to smack of superstition . . . but offer noble and elegant principles for living.”14 For the Byzantine scholar Michael Apostolius (d. ca. 1480), proverbs presented “the truth in furtive fashion.”15 And in a treatise on grammar and rhetoric published at Antwerp in 1566, Joannes Susenbrotus defined the proverb as “a celebrated or well-known saying . . . common to every­ one, commended equally for its antiquity and its wisdom.”16 But the proverb cannot be defined so easily. As James Obelkevich remarks, proverbs employ “a wide range of poetic and rhetorical resources within their limited compass. Metaphor, rhythm, alliteration, assonance, binary construction: these and other devices create in the form of the proverb an echo of the sense.”17 But these qualities also appear in other kinds of verbal expression, including, Obelkevich notes, proverbial phrases

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(“To have an ace up one’s sleeve”) and conventional sayings (“I have other fish to fry”),18 as well as similes (“green as grass,” “dark as night”), metaphorical expressions (“tempest in a teapot,” “ship of state”),19 and other idiomatic expressions.20 As we shall see, earlier writers readily accepted such figures of speech as proverbs, even though they offer no particular advice on human conduct or observations on human nature. Thus Archer Taylor could claim some years ago, with only slight exaggeration, that in his Netherlandish Proverbs Bruegel depicted not “true” proverbs but only proverbial phrases.21 Bruegel also included two fables by Aesop, which William Hansen has called the fable proverb, 22 the belling of the cat and the fox and the stork, shown just to the right of the tavern porch (see Fig. 1). Each creature invites the other to a meal he cannot eat.23 While modern scholars of proverbs, or paremiologists (from the Greek paremia, or proverb), still argue about what constitutes a true proverb24 and its relation to such comparable expressions as maxims, apothegms, and “sentences” (sententiae), Mark Meadow offers excellent advice: “The distinction drawn today between proverbs proper and proverbial expressions, or indeed other linguistic figures, is not one supported by the original sources, and should be, if not dismissed altogether, at least set aside when considering pre-modern materials.”25 Nowadays many people are inclined to view proverbs as the quaint but increasingly musty verbal remains of an earlier time and a simpler life, on a par with superstitions and folklore in general. We may cherish the picturesque formulations of proverbs without using them as infallible guides to wise conduct. For one thing, they may offer contradictory advice, such as “Haste makes waste” and “He who hesitates is lost,” or “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” and “Out of sight, out of mind.”26 They may even appear nonsensical, as does “The exception proves the rule,” until we recall that “to prove” once commonly meant “to test.” Proverbs may also be denigrated as clichés, bromides, and platitudes—the ultimate sins in our search for originality, for a more personal expression in our speech and writing.27 Nevertheless, while the death of the proverb has often been proclaimed, new proverbs and proverbial expressions are

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born all the time: “Ballpark figure,” meaning “an estimate based on an educated guess,” is a colloquial expression that has emerged only in the last half century or so;28 and “It isn’t over until the fat lady sings,” used to describe a situation that remains unresolved until a some event takes place, appears in a recent dictionary of proverbs.29 Even more to the point, proverbs played an important, even vital role in the past. The Greek and Roman writers esteemed proverbs as “simply the vestiges of that earliest philosophy which was destroyed by the calamities of human history,” as Erasmus would later put it,30 and this very antiquity recommended their continued use. Aristotle, in his handbook on rhetoric, places a discussion of proverbs in the section on persuasion, and with good reason.31 Orators appealed to proverbs to make a point in their arguments, to persuade their audiences by assuring them that the speaker’s own opinions and pronouncements were not idiosyncratic but accorded with the opinions and experiences of generations past.32 These “ancient witnesses,” as Aristotle calls them, are “the poets and all other persons whose judgments are known to all,”33 who can be trusted because they have no stake in the matter at hand. Conversely, people, especially uneducated ones, “are delighted when a general statement of the speaker hits those opinions which they hold in a particular case.”34 Or, as Erasmus said, “What could be more convincing than what is said by everyone?”35 Proverbs, as generally acknowledged repositories of wisdom and as ornaments of rhetorical persuasion, have long been quoted much as modern preachers quote scripture, academics cite eminent authorities in their field of study, and politicians lift patriotic sentiments from the speeches of Abraham Lincoln or Franklin D. Roosevelt. Thus, the ancient writers cited proverbs to clinch an argument in a law­suit and employed them copiously as rhetorical devices elsewhere in their speeches and writings. The writers of the Bible, too, employed prov­ erbs and proverbial expressions. King Solomon “spake three thousand proverbs,” we are told in 3 Kings 4:32 (Douay-Rheims version), and it was generally believed that the book of Proverbs was his enduring legacy.

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Christ also often quoted proverbs. We have already encountered a variation of his “Neither cast ye your pearls before swine” in Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs, and Bruegel also depicted Christ’s “If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”36 The twin literary heritage of proverbs, in classical sources and the Bible, recommended them to later ages. Medieval treatises on poetry and letter writing advocated the use of proverbs, preachers used them in their sermons,37 and writers of every variety eagerly incorporated proverbs into their historical works, legal treatises, poetry, plays, and prose fiction such as the chansons de geste and romances.38 Chaucer sprinkled proverbs liberally throughout his Canterbury Tales, although fewer, so the poet tells us, than were collected by the fifth husband of the Wife of Bath who, his widow claimed, knew more proverbs concerning bad women than the world has grass or herbs.39 Similarly, the author of The Celestina, a Spanish picaresque novel first published in 1491, larded his dialogues with proverbs, identifying them with such phrases as “as the old proverb has it,” “as they say,” and “to prove the truth of the old proverb,” and in one speech he strings together a series of old saws and related expressions.40 In the seventeenth century, the characters in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote display a similar fondness for proverbs, especially the rustic but sensible Sancho Panza. 41 Among English writers, proverbs appear frequently in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 42 and not only do Shakespeare’s characters speak proverbs in the plays, 43 but the playwright himself derived some of the play’s titles from proverbial expressions (Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well ). Conversely, Shakespeare created many original expressions that passed into common proverb lore: “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” for example, comes from Romeo and Juliet (2.2.43). Writers used many proverbs at once for rhetorical and often humorous effects, as in the medieval folk book Solomon and Marcolphus, which begins with a long dialogue in which the solemn pronouncements of King Solomon, many drawn from the book of Proverbs, are deflated by the earthy, occasionally scatological, and often irrelevant responses of the peasant

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Marcolphus. The English translation published by the Antwerp printer Gerard Leeu in 1492 gives an idea of this exchange. Early on, Solomon boasts, “God gave wisdom in my mouth, for no one is like me in all parts of the world,” to which Marcolphus replies, “He that hath evil neighbors praiseth himself.” Later Solomon counsels, “Feed up your children and from their youth learn [i.e., teach] them to do well,” and Marcolphus responds, “He that feedeth well his cow eateth often of the milk.”44 In the fifteenth century, the French poet François Villon composed a Ballade des proverbes that begins, “So much the goat paws, her bed’s spoiled; So much the pot’s filled that it cracks; So much one heats iron that it glows.”45 And in the century that followed, the English dramatist John Heywood composed a poetical treatise on marriage whose long title begins with the modest claim, A Dialogue Containing in Effect the Number of All the Proverbs in the English Tongue. 46 Some ten editions of Heywood’s Dialogue were published between 1546 and 1598; the work owed its popularity, perhaps, to such “playne, pithy proverbes old” as the one enshrined in the plea I once encountered on a sign (crediting Heywood) in a bar and grill near Utica, New York: “I pray thee let me and my fellow have, A hair of the dog that bit us last night.”47 Against this background we can understand Erasmus’s lifelong preoccupation with proverbs that so impressed Montaigne. The Greek and Latin writers, particularly those of late antiquity and the Byzantine period, had made collections of proverbs and proverbial expressions, 48 and beginning no later than the eleventh century, 49 proverb collections appear for use by preachers, writers, and schoolboys. Among the collections for the schools are the Liber parobolarum (Book of Proverbs), attributed to Alain de Lille, and the especially popular Distichs of Cato that was widely used during the Middle Ages to instill the principles of moral conduct into schoolboys.50 By the later fifteenth century students learned Latin by translating Latin proverbs into the vernacular and vernacular ones into Latin.51 The revival of ancient Greek and Roman literature, initiated by Petrarch in fourteenth-century Italy and later spreading throughout

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Europe, only increased the general interest in ancient proverbs.52 Greatly facilitated by the invention of the printing press, this dissemination of the classical heritage was accompanied by a need for commentaries explicating these texts, as well as dictionaries of proverbs and related phrases. The first such compilation seems to have been the Proverbiorum Libellus (Book of Proverbs) published at Venice in 1498 by the Italian priest and humanist scholar Polydore Vergil and comprising 306 adages with short commentaries.53 It was soon eclipsed, however, by Erasmus’s Adagiorum Collectecteana (Collection of Adages), which first appeared at Paris in 1500. Containing 818 proverbs, this evolved to become the most monumental—and most famous—of these literary enterprises. Erasmus reworked and considerably expanded this work, publishing it in 1508 under the title Adagiorum Chiliades, whose “thousands of adages” advertised in the title numbered 3,260. Its author prepared a number of later editions of the Adages, each larger than the previous one. The sixth edition, published in 1536, the year of Erasmus’s death, included 4,251 proverbs and continued to be republished long afterward.54 As a modern scholar has said, it was “one of the world’s biggest bedside books; and a great deal more.”55 Erasmus mined his proverbs from ancient Greek and Latin literature and proverb collections, occasionally citing comparable sayings from his native Netherlandish.56 To each entry he added a commentary that varies from a few sentences to many pages. These commentaries explain the significance of each proverb, the circumstances of its origin, often buttressed by copious extracts from the ancient writers, and the various ways it could be employed. In addition, he used these commentaries as springboards to voice his opinions on current religious, political, and social issues, demonstrating how relevant the ancient proverbs were to the readers of his day.57 Like his predecessors and contemporaries, Erasmus had a concep­ tion of the proverb that was much more liberal than ours: after reviewing the various definitions offered by the ancients, he concludes by saying that a proverb is “a saying in popular use, remarkable for some shrewd and

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novel turn.” 58 For him the proverb encompassed many kinds of verbal expressions, including what he termed “proverbial metaphors,” to which he devoted a long section of his introduction,59 citing such familiar similes as “light as a feather,” “black as pitch,” and “white as snow,” as well as less familiar ones, among them “seething as Etna” and “licentious as the carnival of Flora.” 60 Erasmus thus offered the Adages not only as a prodigious haul of antique lore ranging from the sublime to the trivial, to help students retrieve the often obscure allusions they might encounter in classical literature, but also as a veritable fountain of rhetorical forms from which users could draw suitable words and phrases to grace their own speaking and writing. “To interweave adages deftly and appro­pri­ ately,” Erasmus insists, “is to make the language as a whole glitter with sparkles from Antiquity,” 61 and he is often at pains to explain just how a certain proverb or proverbial phrase can be used or varied to meet the needs of a particular writer. 62 He also recommended introducing proverbs with such phrases as “as the proverb runs” and “to use an old phrase,” so that they would be recognized and appreciated by the audience, a practice that had already been followed in The Celestina of 1491.63 Even with his inclusive definition of a proverb, however, Erasmus must have occasionally wondered if some of the expressions he included would pass muster as proverbs with his readers. He felt it necessary to point out “there is a proverb hidden here” in the phrase “more roughly and more plainly.” He assures us that “almost all figures” like the expression “willynilly” [nolens volens] “are proverbial.” He comments on a witticism attributed to the emperor Augustus, “to fish with a golden hook,” that is, to risk a great loss while trying to achieve a modest gain. If this is not a proverb, Erasmus observes, “it is at least proverbial, and not unworthy to be promoted to this rank.” 64 Conversely, in his pursuit of rhetorical elegance, Erasmus did not hesitate to stigmatize an occasional proverb in his collection. “Among the blind the one-eyed man is king” and “The dog offended, the sow paid the penalty,” he said, come from “the dregs of the people” or smack “of the common herd.”65

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The outstanding success enjoyed by the many editions of the Adages not only earned Erasmus the title “the father of proverbs,”66 but it also inspired the publication of abbreviated editions of his Adages intended for use in the Latin schools, sometimes with translations or equivalents given in the vernacular.67 One such schoolbook was issued by Johannes Sartorius in 1544, a collection of three hundred proverbs culled from the Adages; in 1561 he published a second volume that contained more than a thousand proverbs from the same source. In addition, numerous vernacular proverb collections were issued during the sixteenth century. To mention a few, they include Heinrich Bebel’s Proverbia Germanica (German Proverbs) of 1508, Johannes Agricola’s Gemyener Sprichwörter (Common Proverbs) published in three volumes between 1529 and 1544, Sebastian Franck’s Sprichwörter, a massive collection of some seven thousand proverbs and related expressions published in two parts in 1541,68 and Charles de Bouvelles’s Proverbium Vulgarium  .  .  . Libri Tres, published in 1531, a collection of French proverbs accompanied by Latin commentaries.69 A collection of Netherlandish proverbs, with Latin translations, had appeared even earlier in the Lowlands, the Proverbia Communia (Common Proverbs), first published at Deventer in 1480, and adorned with a woodcut frontispiece depicting the twelve-year-old Christ in the Temple, perhaps implying that the learned disquisitions of the temple elders were no match for Christ’s homely parables and proverbs. It predated Erasmus’s Adagiorum Collectecteana by twenty years and by 1497 had gone through twelve editions, three of them in a Low German version.70 Probably intended for use in grammar schools, it contains only what we would consider “genuine” proverbs, with none of the proverbial figures of speech in which Erasmus took such delight.71 However, it was not until some time after Erasmus’s death that his countrymen returned to publishing compilations of vernacular proverbs, both Netherlandish collections and bilingual editions in Netherlandish and French. Three proverb collections appeared at Antwerp, one of the major publishing centers of sixteenth-century Europe.72 The earliest was the

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anonymous Seer schoone spreeckwoorden oft proverbia in Franchoys ende Duytch (Very Beautiful Proverbs in French and Dutch), published by Hans de Laet in 1549 and containing 906 French proverbs along with their Netherlandish equivalents, but lacking commentaries.73 More than 500 of these proverbs were taken from a French collection, Bonne response à tous propos, which had first appeared at Paris in 1547, the latter being a translation, as its title page tells us, of an Italian proverb collection whose contents the compiler had printed along with their French counterparts.74 All this suggests that publishers eagerly capitalized on the popularity of proverbs collections. In fact, in the Netherlands De Laet’s volume was followed the very next year by Duytsche Adagia ofte spreecwoorden (Dutch Adages or Proverbs), compiled by Symon Andriessoon, an Amsterdam notary and schoolmaster, and published at Antwerp by Hendrick Alssens. It contains hundreds of entries, each proverb accompanied by a succinct explanation of its mean­ ing. This was the only Netherlandish proverb collection to do so, a feature that Andriessoon explained in his prologue: “Many kinds of proverbs are in daily use among the people, but the same are at times not completely understood, however they are used and spoken. Instead these proverbs are used more out of custom than from complete understanding.” 75 Andriessoon’s complaint may be more than a rhetorical flourish justifying his commentaries. It suggests that among the proverbs circulating in his time there were some old-fashioned expressions whose significance were gradually fading from memory. In 1568, some years after the publication of the Seer schoone spreeckwoorden in French and Netherlandish, Christophe Plantin published a second bilingual collection, François Goedthals’s Proverbes anciens flamengs et françois correspondants (Old Flemish Proverbs and Corresponding French [Ones]). Far more limited in scope than the vast enterprise represented by Erasmus’s Adages, these modest proverb collections nonetheless contain linguistic riches that can be sampled in still another compilation, the anonymous Gemeene Duytsche Spreckwoorden, published by Peter Warnersen in 1550 at Campen in Holland.76 Borrowing almost all of the first 750 proverbs in Agricola’s Gemyener Sprichwörter of 1529–44, the editor supplemented them with

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further examples, some in Latin, for a total of more than 2,600. This collection lacks commentaries, but, like Erasmus’s Adages, it mingles what we would deem true proverbs with figures of speech, including “He has a double tongue in his mouth,” “This is not cooked for your mouth,” and “I know him hide and hair,”77 as well as the sort of commonplace similes endorsed by Erasmus: “green as grass,” “black as pitch,” and “red as a rose in May.”78 Also included is a fragment of conversation that might have been excerpted from a modern tourist’s handbook of foreign phrases: “Thank you for asking. It goes well with me, God be praised.”79 War­ner­ sen evidently thought highly of this little volume. He wrote in his prefa­ tory letter to the reader: “Gracious reader, the books and writings of all learned men, especially the highly learned Erasmus of Rotterdam, demonstrate how useful and fruitful the common proverbs are, and how well they ornament and embellish a speech; they present much meaning in a few words when used at the right time and place . . . if you take this little book in good faith, you will undoubtedly gain enjoyment and profit from it.”80 These entries, ranging as they do from the most exalted thoughts on the providence of God and scraps of biblical wisdom to the common, even scatological expressions that one would hear on the street and in the tavern, offer us an excellent cross section of the earthy Nether­ landish speech of Bruegel’s time.

ii This great preoccupation with vernacular proverbs in sixteenth-century Netherlands cannot be seen as a manifestation of a new interest on the part of the upper classes in the peasantry and other common folk, as has sometimes been assumed in the case of Bruegel. 81 Even Warnersen made no such claim, merely recommending his homespun sayings and expressions as a way to “ornament and embellish a speech,” thereby echoing Erasmus. But it may be more than a coincidence that Warnersen’s collection and the others described here were published at a time when the Netherlanders were beginning to take a serious interest in their native language, composing spelling books, rhetorical treatises, and the

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like. 82 This phenomenon was not confined to the Netherlands but also occurred in France, England, and Germany. Earlier humanists, Erasmus included, had touted Latin—not the church and scholastic Latin of the Middle Ages, which Renaissance humanists considered barbarous, but the elegant Latin of classical antiquity—which for many humanists (an outstanding exception was Erasmus) was exclusively the Latin of Cicero83—as a literary language superior to the modern vernacular languages. 84 The vernacular, it was argued, was only the natural, artless speech that one learned almost unconsciously from birth and could hardly match Latin in eloquence or in conveying logical thought and abstract reasoning. 85 Erasmus did not deny the value of the vernacular languages for preachers, and he wished that the Bible could be read by plowmen and other common people. 86 But for scholars, Latin was a mature, noble language with its clearly defined rules of grammar and, as Juan Luis Vives, a Spanish humanist living in the Netherlands, expressed it, these very qualities made it preeminently suitable as a universal language, not confined to a particular country or locality. 87 Thus, late in the fifteenth century, the Deventer schoolmaster Bartholomaeus Co­ loniensis could mock a colleague for speaking his mother tongue more fluently than he did Latin. 88 A similar opinion was expressed a generation or so later by Charles de Bouvelles, who in his three volumes of French proverbs assured his readers that he walked the streets and roads to record the common speech of his day. 89 However, he was probably only vouching for the authenticity of the proverbs he listed, for he was also proud that he could trace his native French to that “shining splendor,” Latin.90 Other writers, less intimidated by these formidable claims made for Latin, began to celebrate the merits of their own languages as equally suitable for literary activity.91 This “linguistic nationalism,” to borrow a felicitous term from Jean-Claude Margolin,92 had already appeared among the Italians during the fifteenth century, followed in the sixteenth by the other linguistic groups of western Europe.93 The French poet Joachim du Bellay, for example, in his La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue

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15

Françoyse (The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language), published in 1549, made an impassioned plea for his native tongue, explaining how it could be developed into a literary language the equal of Greek and Latin.94 As it happens, Du Bellay and his fellow poets in the group known as the Pléiade eschewed proverbial language in their own poems,95 but some decades later, in 1579, Henri Estienne, in his Précellence da la langage français (Preeminence of the French Language), cited some 280 French proverbs and proverbial expressions as examples of the infinite riches of the national language.96 Even earlier, some compilers of proverbs collections had been moved by a similar impulse. For the first volume of his proverbs, published in 1529, Agricola took his examples not only from ancient classical sources but also from medieval German literature, while Franck’s collection, designed for use as a school book, paired Latin proverbs with their German equivalents to demonstrate the equality of the two languages in richness of expression.97 And when Martin Luther preached his sermons and translated the Bible from the Latin vulgate into German, he employed many colloquial proverbs and proverbial expressions, not so much to demonstrate the linguistic resources of his native language as to attract as wide a public as possible.98 Nevertheless, as Luther explained in his open letter On Translation composed in 1530, he strove for a German as it was commonly spoken, for “ ‘ What fills the heart overflows the mouth.’ That is speaking good German, the kind I have tried for and, unfortunately, have not always reached or hit upon; for Latin letters are a great hindrance to good German speech.”99 In the Netherlands, the vernacular had to contend not only with Latin but also with French. Even though French coexisted as a parallel lan­ guage spoken throughout much of the southern provinces, native speakers of Netherlandish often felt that their mother tongue suffered in com­ parison. Jan Gymnick (or Gymnicus) expressed this opinion in his trans­ lation of Livy’s Histories, published at Antwerp in 1541.100 In his intro­ duction, Gymnick complains that while other languages flourish, “I cannot understand how that it comes that our Netherlandish language is so poorly ornamented or deemed so incompetent,” and he urges his

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countrymen to write more in their native tongue so as to improve its powers of expression.101 A dozen years later, in 1553, the jurist Jan van den Werve published Het Tresoor der Duytsscher talen (The Treasury of the Netherlandish Language), a book explaining the Latin and other foreign terms that had crept into the Netherlandish vernacular. The author prefaced his volume with a plea that his readers help him to put back on its feet “our mother tongue (that lies like gold under the earth),” so that it does not need to seek help from other languages.102 The publisher of this treatise was none other than Hans de Laet, publisher of the 1549 French and Netherlandish proverb collection, and in his “dedication” to Van den Werve’s book, De Laet repeated the author’s lament about the Netherlandish language but insisted that it is “as mighty, as rich, and as capable as none other.”103 And a few decades later, the Ghent poet Lucas de Heere congratulated his Antwerp colleague Jan van der Noot for demonstrating in his poetry that the Netherlandish tongue was as rich as “German or French, Greek, Roman or Italian.”104 Other writers also vaunted the excellence of the Netherlandish tongue, although none more enthusiastically than the physician and scholar Joannes Goropius Becanus, who in his Origines Antwerpianae (Origins of Antwerp) of 1569 revealed a linguistic nationalism that was downright chauvinistic, demonstrating to his countrymen by means of careful linguistic arguments that Netherlandish was not only the best language in the world but also the oldest, having been spoken by Adam and Eve in paradise.105 While Becanus’s claims were ridiculed by other scholars,106 they were later revived in part by the Dordrecht preacher Abraham Mylius (or Van der Mijl) in a treatise published in 1612 at Leiden.107 Although Mylius accepted the traditional view that the language of Eden had been Hebrew,108 he insisted that the second-oldest language was “Teutonic,” comprising roughly what linguists today term the Germanic family.109 Having survived the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel, it was still a living language in Mylius’s time, hence not only older than Greek and Latin, but its chief variants, German and what he called Belgian (i.e., Netherlandish), had not changed since their

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inception and were uncorrupted by influences from other languages.110 That is why, Mylius assured his readers, the Netherlanders have so little trouble learning other languages.111 As Arno Borst has suggested, such attempts to demonstrate the preeminence of the “lingua belgicae” (the Belgian language) reflect the rising tide of nationalism in the Nether­ lands, particularly in the northern provinces that ultimately achieved independence as the Dutch Republic. Even the German scholar Philipp Cluvier, the first professor of geography at the recently founded University of Leiden, insisted, like Becanus and for much the same reasons, that the speech of Adam and Eve had been Teutonic.112 How much these scholarly but often far-fetched speculations did to further the Netherlandish vernacular would be difficult to determine. Indeed, probably much more effective were the Netherlandish rederijkers, or rhetoricians, who fervently worked to improve their common language and whose infatuation with proverbs embraced not only the written word but images as well. For that reason, we will consider them in the next chapter.

chapter two

the proverb portrayed ., Brief and pithy sayings such as aphorisms, proverbs, and maxims . . . you will paint on doors and walls or even in the glass of windows so that what may aid learning is constantly before the eye. —er asmus

i The ancient grammarian Diomedes pithily described a peculiar quality of proverbs: “the words say one thing and mean another.”1 In this respect, the proverb may be understood as a brief example of allegory, a literary form that Isidore of Seville would later define as “ ‘other-speech,’ for it literally says one thing, and another thing is understood.”2 Erasmus apparently shared this opinion, for in the Adages he explained that “some of these injunctions [about proverbs] may seem superstitious and laughable, yet if one pulls out the allegory [i.e., its true meaning] one will see that they are nothing else but precepts for the good life.”3 This “riddling obscurity,” in the words of one modern scholar, 4 this tension between what we say and what we actually mean, is true not only of proverbs but also of many idiomatic expressions5 and has long been exploited as a source of humor.6 In the late medieval German folk book Till Eulenspiegel, the eponymous hero frequently tricks his victims in this manner. On one occasion, Eulenspiegel is ordered by his employer, a tailor, to finish the “wolf,” slang for a gray peasant coat, but instead he

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19

cuts up the garment and stitches it into the shape of a real wolf.7 Another time, working as a brewer’s assistant, Eulenspiegel is instructed to boil the hops, but instead he boils the family dog that is named Hops and defends himself by saying plaintively, “I do everything people tell me to—and never earn any thanks.” 8 But, as another victimized employer explains to him, “you’re acting according to the words, not the meaning.”9 Such literal interpretations of words and phrases may seem simpleminded to us, as they evidently did to people of earlier centuries, for very often it is the naive or stupid person who takes proverbs and metaphorical expressions at face value.10 In a Renaissance French farce, for example, a wife tries to improve her stupid husband’s behavior by various means, among them, advising him to “ripen his head” (i.e., improve his thinking). He responds by donning a straw covering of the kind employed to ripen fruit. When told to “chew” the scriptures, in other words, to read them, he starts munching on a Bible.11 In a jest book first published at Antwerp in 1554, we find an anecdote about a poor widow who is advised by her friends to grease the judge’s palm to expedite a lawsuit; she literally does so with butter (and thus, incidentally, shames the judge into settling her case).12 Rabelais was also fond of these proverbes en action, as they have been called.13 In a well-known passage in his Gargantua, for example, published in 1534, we are told how the infant Gargantua amused himself: he sat between two stools, hid in the water to avoid the rain, shoed the geese, robbed Peter to pay Paul, made virtue out of necessity, and so forth.14 Only some proverbs and related expressions, however, can be put into pictorial form. How, for example, would one depict such straightforward and often brief precepts as “Haste makes waste” or those two great admonitions of antiquity, “Moderation in all things” and “Know thyself ”? More amenable to visualization are the metaphorical proverbs, such as “ship of state” and “puts a spoke in another’s wheel” (Fig. 3),15 although not even all of these are likely candidates. “Birds of a feather flock together” can indeed be depicted, but it would take some ingenuity to distinguish these birds from their nonproverbial colleagues. Of especial delight to artists is the proverb or proverbial expression describing an

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figure 3: Detail of Fig. 1.

action whose literal meaning is nonsensical or illogical—“to cast roses before swine,” “butting one’s head against the wall”—or even impossible— “to carry daylight in a basket” (referring to those who fritter away their time).16 Artists have long turned to proverbs for subject matter precisely because of this often striking and sometimes hilarious dichotomy between form and meaning that. But the history of proverb pictures is a complicated one, and any attempt to examine it in the detail that it deserves would be “to scale the heavens,” as Andriessoon neatly puts it, that is, to begin an endeavor without hope of completing it.17 That is why we shall focus on the Renaissance (roughly the late fifteenth through the earlier seventeenth centuries), which can justly be called the first great age of the pictured proverb, with particular attention to the Netherlands, where the possibilities of proverb images appear to have been most assiduously explored.

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ii An early instance of a depicted proverb is the ancient adage asinus ad lyram (ass at the lyre), later included by Erasmus in his Adages,18 which describes people who attempt to study a subject or seek a position beyond their capabilities. This expression was frequently cited by medieval writers and inspired images of an ass standing on its hind legs and holding a lyre, a motif that occurs in ecclesiastical sculpture from the twelfth century on, as well as in the mosaic floor of Otranto Cathedral in southern Italy.19 However, only in the later Middle Ages do proverbial figures appear in any number, often among the marginal decorations of illuminated manuscripts, especially books of hours.20 Particularly noteworthy is a book of hours that Kathryn Rudy has christened the R & K Hours (Lille, Médiathèque municipale Jean Lévy),21 produced most likely in Ghent in the 1470s, whose decorated borders feature a number of proverb figures, including the man who bends to get through the world (Fig. 4), as well as the man who spins the world on his thumb and other several figures of speech that Bruegel later introduced into his Netherlandish Proverbs. Proverbial images were also carved on misericords, the narrow ledges on the underside of choir stall seats. A typical example can be found in the church of Our Lady at Aarschot, Belgium (Fig. 5); it shows a seated man gaping in front of an open oven: to “gape before the oven,” meaning to try to yawn as wide as the mouth of an oven, was to attempt something beyond one’s capabilities, an expression that Bruegel also depicted at lower right in his Netherlandish Proverbs (see Fig. 1).22 These and similar proverbs were especially popular on Netherlandish misericords well into the sixteenth century.23 From the late fifteenth century we also have some French manuscripts devoted entirely to proverbs and their illustrations, the so-called Proverbes en rimes (Proverbs in Rhymes), of which two volumes have survived, one in Baltimore and the other in London.24 The volume in Baltimore contains 182 drawings, each accompanied by a verse commentary, among which are such familiar figures as the pillar biter and the man trying to bell the

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figure 4: Man Crawling through the World, R & K Hours, detail of lower border, ca. 1470–80. Lille, Médiathèque municipale Jean Lévy, MS 158, fol. 71r. Image: Kathryn Rudy.

cat, as well as the man falling between two stools and another man who carries fire in one hand and water in the other (Fig. 6).25 A few other examples of such manuscripts, some only in fragments, have survived of what must have been a popular type of illustrated proverb collection in late medieval France. 26 Such manuscripts may also have inspired a “Mirror of Princes” made for the future Francis I of France; it is a manuscript of about 1511–15 with texts and illustrations derived from Erasmus’s Adages.27 By this time, picturing proverbs and other figures of speech was becoming common. A good example occurs in a print produced about 1480 by the German engraver Israhel van Meckenem, King David with Proverbial Sayings from the Psalms (Fig. 7): King David, at the left, points to four men whose enigmatic activities can be determined only from the accompanying inscriptions.28 The honest workman seated in the center is poor because he makes his arrows straight and true. The man to the

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figure 5: Man Gaping against the Oven, 1510–25. Misericord carving. Aarschot, Onze Lieve Vrouwkerk. Photo © IRPA-KIK, Brussels.

left of him, however, hammers a sickle out of shape on his anvil since “what is true I can make crooked, therefore I wear scarlet,” that is, he is a corrupt judge; and the knife sharpener grinds and turns his “cloak to the wind,” meaning that he changes according to how the wind blows, yet another expression that Bruegel illustrated in Netherlandish Proverbs. 29 Finally, the fool at the right fondles a cat, illustrating the proverb “Beware

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figure 6: Carrying Fire in One Hand and Water in the Other. From Proverbes en rimes (Rhyming Proverbs), French, ca. 1480. Ink on paper, 7 7⁄8 x 51⁄8 in. Photo © The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

of cats who lick your face but scratch your back.”30 Proverbs are also pictured in several woodcuts illustrating Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools), first published at Basel in 1494, among which are “Spare the rod and spoil the child” and “He who chases two rabbits loses both,” as well as the familiar “belling the cat.”31 Inspired by Brant’s famous work, the Franciscan preacher Thomas Murner produced his own moral satires Der schelman zunft (Guild of Rascals) and Narrenbeschwörung (Exorcism of Fools), both first published in 1512, many of whose woodcuts illustrated proverbs,32 and about 1530 the German printmaker Jorg Breu the Elder produced two large single-leaf woodcuts illustrating proverbial expressions.33 One shows the phrase “to let the ears be milked” (Fig. 8), meaning to be receptive to flattery;34 the other

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figure 7: Israhel van Meckenem, King David with Proverbial Sayings from the Psalms. Engraving. Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.

pictures “to smell the roast,” said of those who are always seeking free food and drink. In Erasmus’s De Ratione Studii (On the Method of Study), first published in 1511 with an expanded edition appearing the following year, he counseled his readers to inscribe proverbs, maxims, and the like on drinking cups and rings, and to paint them on doors, walls, and “even the glass of windows,”35 probably a reference to the painted-glass panels that were often inserted into windows of the period.36 Erasmus gave an example of this advice in his colloquium The Godly Feast, first published in 1522. The philosophically minded Eusebius has invited some friends to lunch: painted on the wall at the entrance to the courtyard of his house they encounter three maxims on the godly life in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; the garden scene frescoed on the gallery walls contains emblematic plants and animals accompanied by inscribed proverbs; later, at the meal, Eusebius’s guests drink from cups inscribed with such sayings as “No one is harmed but by himself ” (i.e., the wine should not be blamed for its

figure 8: Jorg Breu, Milking the Ears. Woodcut. Gotha, Schlossmuseum, Schloss Friedenstein.

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27

misuse) and “In wine there is truth.”37 Elsewhere, Erasmus writes of the proverb Homo bulla (Man is but a bubble): “This truth ought to be written in the courts of princes, on their drinking cups, and in their tapestries and banners.”38 To what extent Erasmus was reflecting a current taste for proverbial subjects in domestic decoration is uncertain, but in the later fifteenth century, the French poet Henri Baude composed his dictz moraulx pour faire tapisserie, “moral sayings for use in tapestries.”39 Morever, a collection of Baude’s proverb poems assembled early in the next century by one Jacques Robertet bears the title Dictz moraux pour tapis ou verrières de fenestres (Moral Sayings for Tapestries or Glasses of Windows), the “glasses of windows” probably referring to painted glass panels of the kind that Erasmus had apparently described. 40 No proverb tapestries of any sort appear to have survived, except for one late-fifteenth-century Flemish fragment, now preserved in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (Fig. 9). It consists of an abstract floral background against which various figures act out a number of proverbs, some of which later appear in Bruegel’s Berlin panel, including the unfaithful wife draping a blue cloak over her husband. 41 Bruegel’s so-called Twelve Proverbs (Fig. 10), generally dated to the early 1560s, probably originated as a set of painted wooden plates perhaps to be displayed in a kitchen; 42 only later were they united within their present framework and identified by short inscriptions. 43 Most likely intended as domestic decoration, too, are such small paintings as one that the Austrian artist Albrecht Altdorfer produced in 1531, depicting the proverb “Beggary rides on the train of Pride,” in which a beggar family sits on the train of an elegantly dressed couple strolling toward a richly decorated castle. 44 Several Netherlandish proverb paintings seem to have originated in this period. An anonymous panel of about 1515–20 depicts a man with a staff creeping into a transparent world globe containing a landscape rem­ iniscent of the paintings of Joachim Patinir (Fig. 11), 45 while his counter­ part emerges from the opposite side of the sphere grasping a staff now bent out of shape. This enigmatic picture is explained by the verses

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figure 9: Various Proverbs. Tapestry fragment, Netherlandish, late 15th century. Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

inscribed above: “I would gladly go through the world upright, but to get through it, I must go crookedly,” meaning, of course, that the man must abandon any moral standards he might have and resort to trickery to succeed in life. 46 The same subject appears in the R & K Hours (see Fig. 4) and on a carved Netherlandish misericord toward the end of the fifteenth century, 47 and while I have not encountered a relevant saying in the proverb collections of the period, very likely “a proverb is hidden here,” as Erasmus would say. 48 Another painting, this one executed in tempera on cloth and dated 1523, depicts a saying scorned by Erasmus as smacking

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figure 10: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Twelve Proverbs. Antwerp, Museum Mayer van den Bergh. Photo: © IRPA-KIK, Brussels.

of “the common herd” but which nonetheless is recorded in many proverb collections: “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”49 This is a saying that does not lend itself easily to a witty visualization, and indeed, the painter merely shows us four half-length male figures, the one at the far left (presumably blessed with two healthy eyes) pointing to the one-eyed man situated between two blind ones. Much more successful is a composition that apparently enjoyed a certain popularity, for at least four copies have survived (Fig. 12).50 Prob­ ably originating in Antwerp shortly after midcentury, it depicts two men in bust length who confront the viewer with vacant grins; the man on left, sporting a fool’s cap, thrusts a large wooden spoon into his mouth and with his other hand proffers a bowl of food to his companion. Above the figures is a frieze containing, from left to right, the letter D, a transpar­ ent imperial globe, a human foot, and a stringed instrument re­sembling

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figure 11: He Who Would Make His Way through the World Must Bend, Netherlandish, ca. 1515–20. Isselburg, Museum Wasserburg Anholt.

the modern violin. This is a rebus, in which pictures represent words, and the phrase indicated by D and the names of the other objects in Netherlandish tells us that “The world feeds many fools.”51 I have yet to find this saying in any Renaissance proverb collections, but Erasmus would undoubtedly have promoted it to the status of a proverb, and in fact, the phrases presented by Renaissance rebuses were very often proverbial.52

iii The artist who designed this last picture may well have belonged to one of the Netherlandish rederijker kamers (chambers of rhetoric), whose members were especially fond of such wordplay. The rederijkers are important for any study of pictured proverbs, not least because of their intimate connections with the artists of the time. The rederijker kamers can be best described as literary societies that drew their members from a wide public, but with a preponderance of craftsmen, artisans, and merchants. One of the wealthier members, generally a merchant, presided as “prince” at their gatherings and probably funded some of their special

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31

figure 12: The World Feeds Many Fools, after 1550. Rebus painting. Location unknown. Photo: RKD, The Hague.

events. The rederijkers presented poetic and dramatic performances on such private and public occasions as annual religious processions, carnival revelry, and the civic festivities that welcomed visiting sovereigns and other dignitaries. Their drama and poetry range in tone from serious moralizing subjects to farces and comic verse. Each town in the Nether­ lands had at least one rederkijker kamer; the larger towns boasted two or more; Antwerp had three, of which the Violieren had been closely associated with the artists’ guild since the late fifteenth century.53 As a member of the Antwerp artists’ guild, Pieter Bruegel would have had many contacts with the rederijkers; indeed, his good friend the merchant Hans Franckaert was listed in the records of the St. Luke’s guild not as an artist but as a member of the Violieren, and Bruegel’s art shows many connections with rederijker imagery.54 Periodically, the regional chambers gathered for a Landjuweel, a literary competition so named from the juweel, or “jewel,” the prize awarded to the winners of the various categories.

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Bruegel most likely attended the most famous of these competitions, the Landjuweel hosted in 1561 by the Violieren of Antwerp for the chambers of Brabant.55 Artists probably collaborated with the rederijker poets to design the rebuses that decorated many of the coats of arms as well as the so-called welcoming rebuses displayed by the participating chambers on this occasion.56 As poets and dramatists, the rederijkers not only were very much aware of the expressive possibilities of their native tongue but were also firmly convinced that their own literary efforts contributed significantly to its improvement and ultimate perfection. When the plays performed in the Antwerp Landjuweel of 1561 were published the following year, the factor (artistic leader) of the Violieren, Willem van Haecht, contributed a prefatory essay, in which he informed his readers that the brilliance of the Landjuweel productions had awakened his hope that before long, the Netherlands would have poets equal to the likes of Petrarch, Ariosto, and Ronsard, who would contribute to “the embellishment of our Nether­ landish language.”57 With a similar goal in view, some years later, in 1584, the Amsterdam chamber In Liefd Bloyende sponsored the publication of a Netherlandish grammar entitled Twe-spraack van de Nederduytsche letter­ kunst (Dialogue on Low German [Netherlandish] Literature), a work that Simon Schama has described as “a spelling book, etymology and grammar all in one.”58 Its preparation was supervised by a member of the chamber, the famous poet Hendrick Laurensz Spieghel, who added the proud claim that the Nederlandish language was “richer than all other tongues known to us.”59 Probably in the early 1550s, another rederijker, Reyer Gheurtsz, had copied some two thousand proverbs from various earlier collections, including the Proverbia Communia, most likely intended for the benefit of his associates in the Amsterdam chamber De Eglentier.60 There is no doubt that rederijkers everywhere reveled in proverbs. A rederijker ballad of 1542, in fact, carries a title promising its readers “many beautiful admonitions and teachings, also with many common proverbs.” 61 The rederijkers employed proverbs in their plays and poems,62 and they especially

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enjoyed displaying their rhetorical skills by composing a referein, a poetic form especially popular at this time, around a single proverb or proverbial phrase that was repeated as a refrain at the end of each stanza. 63 A good example can be found in a poem by the fifteenth-century Bruges rederijker Anthonis de Roovere, whose collected works were first published at Antwerp only in 1562.64 Each verse of De Roovere’s poem ends with the refrain “It is bad to limp with cripples,”65 a variant of the proverb “He who goes about with cripples will learn to limp,” meaning, as Andriessoon tells us, that one generally learns from the company one keeps, good or bad.66 In the sixteenth century, we find “The drink-pot makes many [drinkers] moneyless” and “As you make your bed, so you must sleep in it” among the proverbs in a collection of refereinen published by Jan van Doesborch at Antwerp in 1524.67 Among the refereinen of Anna Bijns, an Antwerp schoolteacher and poet who may have been a rederijker herself,68 we find such proverbial refrains as the biblical “A tree is known by its fruit” and “Who is without sin may cast the first stone,”69 as well as more secular ones, including the familiar “’Tis lost roses strewn before swine” and a variation of the venerable adage “How could asses’ hooves play on harps?” probably directed, as it happens, at Martin Luther and his followers.70 The rederijkers could also act out proverbs, and a particularly striking instance occurs in the famous Antwerp Landjuweel of 1561. The splendid procession inaugurating this festival included the fools of the participating chambers. Jeurken, the chief fool of the Violieren, rode in state on horseback, displaying a placard whose inscription boasted, “I am so handsome I do not know myself ” (Fig. 13). Accompanying him were two musician-fools on foot, one playing a violin, the other drawing a bow across the jawbone of a large animal. Also in the procession was the fool of the Malines chamber The Peony, who asked bystanders: “Waer kyckt den zot?” (Where does the fool look?), to which he provided his own answer: “Wtter mouwe” (From out of the sleeve).71 The words on Jeurken’s placard represented an absurd inversion of the well-known Socratic injunction “Know thyself ” (which was familiar throughout the Middle Ages and commented on at great length by Erasmus, who called

figure 13: Three Fools of the Violieren Chamber, Antwerp, 1561. Pen and ink with water­color. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, MS II 13.368 C RP, p. 27.

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35

it one of the three great proverbs to live by).72 Jeurken’s companion with the bizarre musical instrument personified a kaakspeler, or jawbone player, describing people in possession of ill-gotten gains. Finally, the question and answer posed by the fool of the Malines chamber embodies the phrase “To let the fool look (or spring) out of the sleeves,” an expression that appears in the Kampen proverb collection.73 It signified “to play the fool” and is given a positive twist in a Dutch song of the early seventeenth century that assures us that at meals and other times of relaxation, we are sometimes permitted to “let the fool spring from the sleeves.”74 Thus even as the fool of the Malines chamber demonstrated his own folly, he was inviting participants and spectators alike to enjoy themselves on this festive occasion.75 To what extent artists active in rederijker circles actually designed proverb images needs further study,76 but it is significant that a number of proverbial subjects in paintings, drawings, and prints have survived from sixteenth-century Antwerp,77 and within the context of this close association between rederijkers and artists in Antwerp Bruegel emerged as the first Netherlandish artist to make proverbial subjects one of his specialties. Beginning with Big Fish Eat the Little Fish of 1556 (see Fig. 31), he designed a number of proverb prints for Hieronymus Cock, the major print publisher in Antwerp who exported prints throughout Europe,78 and in 1559, Bruegel finished his first and most complex proverb painting, Netherlandish Proverbs (see Fig. 1), presumably for a private patron. Bruegel’s model for this painting was most likely the “proverb country” etched by Frans Hogenberg, which teems with figures who act out some forty-three proverbs (Fig. 14) and was published no later than 1558, when Plantin’s records list a print variously described as the blauw huycke or bleue robe, referring to the inscription on the print.79 Bruegel must have studied this print closely before he painted Netherlandish Proverbs, for he took over almost all of Hogenberg’s proverbs—and added many more. 80 Whereas Hogenberg had carefully labeled each figure or group in his Blau Huicke print with the proverb it represented, Bruegel dispensed with inscriptions altogether, leaving it to the viewer to puzzle out the meaning

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figure 14: Frans Hogenberg, Die Blau Huicke, ca. 1558. Engraving. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique.

not only of each figure of speech but of the picture as a whole. Would his painting of a village gone mad have inspired laughter in those who were privileged to view it, as did the antics of the three rederijker fools of 1561? This question is more difficult to answer than it might first appear. Hogenberg—or possibly Plantin—inscribed across the upper margin of his print the following two lines: “Die Blau Huicke is dit meest gheneamt / Maer des werelts abuisen he[t] beter betaempt,” which is usually understood to mean “This is mostly called the Blue Cloak [Blau Huicke, also Blawe or Blauwe Huyck], but a better name for it is the deceits [or deceptions] of the world.” The key word here is abuisen (deceits), whose nuances of meanings in Bruegel’s time ranged from “erroneous opinions” and other forms of self-deceit to deliberate deception or trickery on the part of others. 81 This general idea of deceit is reinforced by the title Die Blau Huicke, which presumably refers to the woman cloaking her husband in the foreground left of center. As we have seen, she is the unfaithful wife very much as Bruegel showed her in the Berlin panel, but the expression “to

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hang the blue cloak” on someone applied more widely to human folly and deception in general. 82 In the fifteenth-century Netherlandish farce Rubben, for example, a husband of three months is convinced by his mother-in-law that he is the father of the child just delivered by his wife, the mother-in-law boasting thereafter that one should treat all fools in this manner: “hang the blue cloak on him and stick his head in a sack.”83 The Blue Cloak received a more elaborate treatment in the annual pro­ cession commemorating the Feast of the Assumption held at Antwerp in August 1563. The new Punten, or floats, especially constructed for this occasion were dedicated to the follies of Elck, that is, Everyman, as we learn from the printed Ordinantie (a sort of souvenir program) for this year, and the third Punt featured an old woman named Old Deceit (Outbedroch) who “blinds Elck with the blue cloak.” At her feet lay a pile of blue cloaks that her attendants slipped over the heads of some of her followers, while similar garments covered the people riding in her entourage. 84 It is evident that the blue cloak could also signify deceit in general, roughly comparable to our expressions “to hoodwink”85 or, more commonly, “to pull the wool over someone’s eyes.” Indeed, the cloak could signify deceit regardless of its color. 86 Thus interpreted, the title of Hogenberg’s print would seem to enlarge the message of the Blue Cloak even further: even the merely foolish or ill-advised activities shown, such as throwing roses before swine or filling in the well after the calf has drowned in it, represent the self-deceit that pervades much of our everyday life, a melancholy truth summed up in Goedthals’s proverb collection of 1568: “Everywhere there is deceit.”87 But we cannot be sure if this is the correct reading. As it happens, the key word abuisen could mean not only “deceptions” or “errors” but also something “strange” or “odd,” in the sense of being laughable, 88 and Mark Meadow has cogently suggested that Hogenberg’s print and, by extension, Bruegel’s painting, were intended to show not figures of folly but simply figures of fun. 89 This question is not easy to decide, precisely because figures of speech, as we have abundantly seen, can express both fun and folly.

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We shall return to this question after we have looked at the figures of speech explored in the next three chapters. In chapter three, we learn how an old proverb, and a rather laconic one at that, inspired Hieronymus Bosch to create an all-encompassing image of sinful humanity, an image that exerted a potent influence on artists well into the seventeenth century. The fourth chapter presents a remarkable suite of proverb prints issued sometime after 1550, whose criticism of moral shortcomings is often overshadowed by a verbal and visual virtuosity that has much in common with contemporary emblems. Finally, just as the rederijkers often followed their sinnespelen, or edifying allegorical dramas, with a farce, in chapter five we turn to the singular case of a verse from the book of Isaiah that, after a notorious career in the visual arts—one that would surely have dismayed the prophet himself—seems finally to have attained the respectable status of a proverb. And “now’s the time to pick the beans,” as one of Erasmus’s adages puts it,90 meaning that it is time to get to the business at hand.

chapter three

from hay to turnips The Curious Career of a Bosch Invention

., He who grabs most, has most. Too much is not enough. —proverbia communia, 1480

i Hieronymus Bosch nourished his fertile visual imagination on verbal images, including puns and proverbs.1 A good case in point is a drawing by Bosch now preserved in Berlin (Fig. 15), showing an owl perched in the hollow of a large tree; the woods behind are flanked by two prominent human ears, and seven human eyes dot the foreground. Although many details in this enigmatic scene remain obscure to modern viewers, it basically illustrates the saying “The field has eyes, the woods have ears.” This venerable adage is not unlike our own “The walls have ears,” which counsels circumspection in the conduct of our affairs2 and one that occurs in the collections of De Laet, Warnersen, and Goedthals.3 It was also depicted in a north Netherlandish woodcut of 1546, inscribed with the words of the proverb itself. 4 The drawing is not Bosch’s most complex proverb image; that can be found in the Haywain triptych, now in the Prado, Madrid (Fig. 16), and was painted most likely in the last decade of his life.5 In the central panel of the Haywain (Fig. 17), the broad landscape is dominated by an enormous hay cart. It is closely attended by the rich and

39

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from hay to turnips

figure 15: Hieronymus Bosch, The Field Has Eyes, the Woods Have Ears. Drawing. Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett. Photo: Jörg P. Anders. © Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.

mighty of this world, the pope and prelates, the emperor, kings and princes, serenely following the hay wagon on horseback, in contrast to the more humble folk, some armed with ladders and pitchforks, who swarm around the cart in a desperate attempt to grab some of its contents or violently attack those who already have some in their possession. These hay seekers are joined by others who surge through a rocky cleft at the right. In 1604, when the triptych had been in Spain for some years, the Hieronymite friar José de Sigüenza, librarian at the monastery-palace El Escorial, linked Bosch’s wagonload of hay to two Old Testament pas­ sages, Isaiah 40:6: “All flesh is grass, and all the glory thereof as the flower of the field,” and Psalm 102:15: “Man’s days are as grass, as the flower of

from hay to turnips

41

figure 16: Hieronymus Bosch, Haywain. Triptych, inner panels. Madrid, Museo del Prado.

the field so shall he flourish.”6 These verses had already inspired many com­mentaries on the brevity of human life in the religious literature of the later Middle Ages. In an English version of the fourteenth-century allegorical poem Le Pélerinage de la vie humaine by Guillaume de Deguilleville, we are told that man is destined for death just as grass is for the scythe.7 In De Ure van ons dood (The Hour of Our Death), a moralizing poem composed by the Brussels rederijker Jan van den Dale and published about 1516, the year of Bosch’s death, the poet compares himself to a “poor blade of grass or flower in a field” [een arm gherseken oft bloemken] that blooms in the summer and in the winter dies like hay; elsewhere he tells us that a man born of woman grows as a poor flower [een arm bloemken op een velt]. 8 As it happens, however, Sigüenza’s interpretation misses its mark, for Bosch’s haywain shows not the physical fragility of human existence but rather the spiritual fragility of its eternal soul, and the Spanish historian Ambrosio de Morales had already advanced the correct interpretation some twenty years earlier, when he described it in the following words: “This ‘wagon of hay,’ as it is called in Flemish, means the same thing as a

figure 17: Central panel of Fig. 16.

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‘wagon of nothingness’ in Castillian. So, as a wagon of hay, it is in truth a wagon of nothingness, a name most appropriate for it.”9 Indeed, according to a Dutch proverb current in this period, it is al hoy (now spelled hooi ), that is, “all hay” or “nothing but hay.”10 Similarly, Andriessoon gives us the expression Ten is niet een hoy waert, “it is not worth a straw,” hoy signifying both hay in general and a single straw.11 A proverb in De Laet’s collection offers a cynical reversal: “He who does evil earns a wagon of salt; he who does good earns a wagon of hay,” salt, of course, being considerably more valuable than hay.12 Bosch thus employed hay as the most fitting symbol of the intrinsic worthlessness of all temporal possessions, honors, and pleasures, especially when measured against the spiritual “goods” that the blessed souls will enjoy after death. A rather different use of hay symbolism occurs in a Netherlandish poem known to us in a manuscript of about 1465, probably copied from an earlier source. Bearing the title “Vanden hopper hoeys” (“Of the Heap of Hay”), it tells us that God has heaped up good things on earth like a stack of hay for the benefit of all men, but “Each [man] would gladly have the largest part of this goodly heap of hay” [goeden hopper hoys].13 In this case, the haystack serves as a simile for the very liberality with which God has endowed humanity with earthly goods; there is nothing intrinsically bad about this goeden hopper hoys in itself. If Bosch knew these verses, as is sometimes suggested, they may well have inspired his great mound of hay, although with its many attendants, the hay cart probably also owes something to the allegorical chariots that enjoyed great popularity in the art and literature of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance,14 especially the Triumphs of Petrarch, which inspired so many prints and tapestries of the period (Fig. 18).15 Whatever the case, the Haywain shows how the transitory goods and honors of this world are greedily sought after by rich and poor alike, and not only laypeople but those in religious orders as well. In his Pélerinage de la vie humaine, De Deguilleville had endowed the personified Avarice with six arms, each one dedicated to a subcategory of this vice: rapine, theft, usury, false beggary, simony, and the corruption of justice.16 In the

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from hay to turnips

figure 18: Triumph of Love. Tapestry after Petrarch, Trionfi, early 16th century. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien oder KHM, Wien.

immediate foreground of the Haywain Bosch, too, shows us various species of avarice. Thus the man wearing a tall hat and accompanied by a child at lower left may well be a false beggar, one who does not need to beg. Nearby another man has set up his table with jars, charts, and other para­ phernalia of the itinerant quack, his hay-stuffed purse testifying all too clearly to his success with the gullible. At lower right, several nuns force hay into a large bag under the watchful eye of a corpulent monk. 17 “Avarice has doomed many a soul,” we are warned in a later fifteenth-​ century Netherlandish manuscript collection of school texts for young children,18 but, as several scholars have observed, Bosch condemns not only greed but also other varieties of human sin and folly.19 This is especially evident on top of the wagon (Fig. 19), where two lovers embrace in the bushes and a second pair is engaged in singing, accompanied by a lute-playing youth clad in white.20 While the transition from greed to

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45

figure 19: Lovers in central panel of Fig. 16.

love may seem abrupt to modern viewers, it did not, apparently, to people of the Middle Ages. In an immensely popular religious treatise, the Speculum Christiani, we find in the section under “Avarice” a citation from St. Gregory asserting that “He has made a tabernacle of devils that labors for riches and dignities and after he has gotten them, turns himself to lechery, so that lechery may waste all that covetousness gathered together.”21 Attending Bosch’s amorous company is an angel looking up in despair at the threequarter-length figure of Christ who appears above the haywain as if to remind us, in the words of Matthew 16:26, “for what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?”22 Moreover, Christ spreads his arms to display the wounds in his hands and side, much like the gesture he makes in many Last Judgment scenes, including Bosch’s triptych now in Vienna.23 Oblivious to the divine gaze and intimations of divine reckoning, the young lovers are seduced by the devil playing the music of the flesh on his horn-shaped nose, his blue color, as we have seen, betraying his deceitful nature.24 Indeed, seduction pervades the whole

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from hay to turnips

scene: if worthless hay could signify falsehood and deceit in general,25 then the haywain becomes the very bait by which devils snare humanity and draw it toward its inevitable doom. Bosch situates this pullulating mass of sinners and their seducers firmly within the framework of sacred history. The left wing (Fig. 20) displays the twofold entry of sin into the world, the Fall of the Rebel Angels from Heaven and the Fall of Adam and Eve. These two lapses from grace are appropriately shown together, as it was a traditional belief that God had created the first pair to fill the places left empty by Lucifer and his followers.26 But the divine plan had been thwarted by Adam and Eve, whose fall corrupted human nature, and the fate awaiting their descendants is dramatically shown in the right wing (Fig. 21), an infernal landscape through which swarm devils who not only administer the usual punishments but also busily lay bricks for a large tower. Towers are often encountered in medieval descriptions and depictions of the afterlife, 27 but to my knowledge, it is only in heaven that they are actually under construction. Christ had spoken of the “many mansions” awaiting the blessed in his father’s house (John 14:2),28 and for medieval com­men­ tators, the building of these heavenly abodes was still under way, their materials consisting of the good deeds or even the “living stones” of the faithful themselves.29 It is tempting to suppose that Bosch ingeniously inverted this venerable topos and showed its infernal counterpart built by the sins of the damned.30 Indeed, this was the opinion of Sigüenza who in his commentary on this section of the Haywain speaks of the new chambers constructed to accommodate those entering hell, their stones being the “souls of the miserable damned here transformed into instru­ ments of their own punishment.”31 Of the two versions of the Haywain that have come down to us, the one in El Escorial is a close copy painted about 1550.32 Bosch’s original work is preserved in the Prado, Madrid, and retains the painting on its outer wings (Fig. 22) that is lacking in the Escorial triptych.33 These wings depict a careworn, shabbily dressed man of middle age making his way through a sinister landscape. He has been identified as the prodigal son

figure 20: ( left). Eden panel of Fig. 16. figure 21: (right). Hell panel of Fig. 16.

figure 22: Hieronymus Bosch, Haywain. Outer wings. Madrid, Museo del Prado.

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49

described in one of Christ’s parables and as a peddler, but whatever his specific identity, he epitomizes the Christian pilgrim who must pass through this sinful world to reach his true homeland in heaven, a familiar theme in the later Middle Ages.34 What seems to be the earliest reference to the Haywain occurs in a recorded sale to Philip II of Spain in 1570 of six paintings by Bosch by the heirs of Felipe de Guevara,35 whose father had lived for some years in the Netherlands. Several years later, in 1574, Philip had it installed in El Escorial.36 Unfortunately, we do not know who originally commissioned the Haywain. While its triptych format had long been traditional for religious altarpieces, its subject would have been most unsuitable as a setting for the liturgy of the Mass.37 Yet just as sermons were delivered from the pulpit, physically separated from the altar, Bosch’s painted sermon could have been on view elsewhere in the church. This is most likely the case, for example, for the Seven Works of Mercy painted in 1504 by the Master of Alkmaar, apparently commissioned for the church of St. Lawrence in Alkmaar not only as a tribute to its patron saint, who was known for his charity to the poor and sick, but probably also as a model of charitable behavior for its parishioners.38 Conversely, similar moralizing subjects had long been depicted in domestic settings, including wall murals and tapestries; another triptych by Bosch, his Garden of Earthly Delights, is recorded in the palace of Hendrik III, count of Nassau in 1516, probably not many years after its completion.39

ii Despite the obscurity of its origins and early history, Bosch’s Haywain, both its composition and its subject matter in general, found a sym­ pathetic audience in sixteenth-century Netherlands, including Mencia de Mendoza, the third wife of Hendrik III. Born in Spain, Mencia was a cultivated woman, well read in ancient literature, an admirer of Erasmus, and a patron of her countryman Juan Luis Vives. 40 She also acquired paintings by Jan Gossaert, whom she took under her protection during

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from hay to turnips

his last years, as well as works by Bernard van Orley, Jan Vermeyen, and Maerten van Heemskerck. 41 Despite Mencia’s strong humanist interests and her taste for the Italianizing style of painting then in vogue in the Netherlands, she also appreciated the art of Hieronymus Bosch, whose Garden of Earthly Delights was still on view in the Nassau palace at Brussels. An inventory of her effects made in 1548 lists three paintings described as by “Jeronimo Bosque,”42 and on two occasions she tried to obtain a painting of Bosch’s Haywain. In October 1539, just before Mencia’s return to Spain after the death of her husband Hendrik the previous year, her agent in Antwerp, Arnao del Plano, obtained a “carro [cart] de Geronimo Bosque” painted on panel, but for some reason it was never sent to Spain. Mencia later instructed Del Plano to be on the lookout for another painting of this subject, but if he ever found one, it may well have perished with a number of other Flemish paintings acquired for Mencia by Del Plano when the boat carrying them to Spain was shipwrecked. 43 As we have seen, the replica of the Haywain now in El Escorial was probably done around midcentury, a decade or so after Mencia’s failure to obtain a copy of the work. Sometime earlier, a version of the Haywain had appeared in a series of tapestry cartoons whose designs were inspired by Bosch’s art. The cartoons have long since disappeared, but the tap­estries woven after them form one of the most convoluted but fascinating epi­ sodes in the history of sixteenth-century Netherlandish art. The tapestries are first recorded in an inventory made in 1542 of the palace furnishings of King Francis I in Paris. Here they are described as “five tapestries of the devys de Hieronyme” (devised by Hieronymus); this was most likely Hieronymus Bosch, to judge from the subjects of the tapestries, for they depicted the Temptation of St. Anthony, The Elephant, St. Martin, and the Garden of Earthly Delights, as well as a chartée de foing (cart of hay) whose contents “people of all estates struggle to possess,” each tapestry worked in gold, silver, and silk and presented within a fictive frame decorated with festoons of fruit. 44 This tapestry series was most probably of Brussels manufacture. Francis seems to have had a taste for Netherlandish tapestries, which is hardly surprising, for the tapestry weavers of the

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Netherlands had long been famous, especially those of Brussels. When Raphael completed the cartoons for a set of tapestries for the Sistine Chapel in 1516, they were sent immediately to Brussels, where they were used as the patterns for tapestries that were shipped back to Rome. 45 Francis commissioned a number of Brussels tapestries from Joris Vezeleer, a goldsmith and artistic agent residing in Antwerp, 46 and it may have been through Vezeleer that the French king obtained his five tapestries of the “devys de Hieronyme.” What are probably Francis’s Boschian tapestries appear later in a royal inventory made during the reign of Louis XIV; here they are described as five tapestries of the “Visions of St. Anthony,” of Brussels manufacture after the designs of the “old Bruegel,” presumably meaning Pieter the Elder. 47 After this, aside from a possible brief reference to them by André Félibien in 1705, the Visions of St. Anthony owned by Francis I disappear from recorded history, 48 but we can perhaps gain an idea of the appearance of four of them from another set of Boschian tapestries owned by Cardinal Granvelle, archbishop of Malines and onetime first councilor of the Netherlands. In a letter of 15 June 1566, Granvelle’s vicar in Brussels, Maximilien Morillon, informed the cardinal, then in his second year of exile from the Netherlands, that he was sending “the new tapestries and those of Bosch” [les tapisseries nouvelles et de Bosche] to Granvelle’s archiepiscopal palace in Malines. 49 Morillon does not indicate their number or subjects, but in the following year, 1567, the duke of Alva, recently arrived from Spain to restore order in the Netherlands after a period of considerable religious unrest, requested a set of copies after Granvelle’s Bosch tapestries.50 This suggests that the original cartoons no longer existed. Morillon at first refused, saying that Alva could copy one of the subjects from the large painting in the collection of William of Orange; as William owned the Garden of Earthly Delights, inherited from his uncle Hendrik III of Nassau, this identifies one of the subjects in Granvelle’s series. Ultimately, however, Alva was apparently granted his wish and was allowed to have copies made after Granvelle’s tapestries.51

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As it happens, a set of four tapestries after Bosch, preserved in the Patrimonio Nacional in Madrid and now displayed in El Escorial, cor­ responds in subject matter to four of those described in the French inven­ tories, omitting The Elephant.52 Like the set owned by Francis I, they are also surrounded by fictive frames decorated with fruit, and it is very likely that they were made after the same cartoons as the French set. The Spanish series has been identified both with Granvelle’s Boschian tapestries and with Alva’s copies, but because they have no armorial bearings, this problem cannot be resolved.53 In addition to the Haywain, they include a Garden of Earthly Delights that follows the inner panels of Bosch’s triptych reasonably faithfully but are larger in scale and reverse the composition of each panel. Two other subjects, the Temptation of St. Anthony and the Feast of St. Martin (now identified as St. Anthony Leaving for the Wilderness), are vaguely Boschian in style but do not correspond to any of his surviving or recorded works and might even represent new compositions designed expressly for the original tapestry cartoons, although we cannot be sure.54 The Haywain tapestry (Fig. 23) shows still another relationship to Bosch: while its composition generally recalls that of the Prado triptych, it differs from the latter in all of its details.55 To cite the most obvious dif­ferences, instead of the music-making lovers seated on Bosch’s wagon, we see a group of cavorting devils; the wagon itself is drawn not by demons but by two quite ordinary horses, one ridden by a whip-wielding peasant; and Bosch’s expansive, gently undulating landscape has given way to a much more mountainous terrain, on whose slopes a battle is in progress. Another detail not in Bosch’s painting is that of the two men bearing a reliquary from which spills some hay. This group has been interpreted as a blast against the Roman Catholic cult of saints and relics,56 but as Paul Van­ denbroeck has suggested, it is more likely that the presence of the hay reliquary demonstrates that worldly possessions and honors have become the true objects of veneration.57 While Bosch’s framing scenes of Eden and hell have been omitted, the universal extent of human greed is nonetheless conveyed by the placement of the haywain and its entourage within an imperial orb, which in turn floats on a tur­bulent sea, the “sea

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figure 23: Netherlandish School, Haywain. Tapestry. Madrid, Patrimonio Nacional. Copyright © Patrimonio Nacional.

of this world,” an age-old metaphor of the vicissitudes and turmoil of human life,58 whose moral dangers are vividly symbolized by the sea monsters rising from its depths. Among them a large fish seizes a smaller one in its mouth (“The big fish eat the smaller ones,” thus reinforcing the message of the hay cart), and several devils emerge from the water at lower left to grapple with a monk and pluck sinners from the globe itself, while three angels flutter, helplessly it seems, around the jeweled cross at upper right. It has been suggested that the Madrid tapestry reproduces a varia­ tion Bosch himself painted of his Prado composition, but it was more likely an original invention of the tapestry designer. Bosch, as we have seen, envisioned the stack of hay as the “bait” by which humanity is lured to its ultimate damnation, but this theme of diabolical deception is largely muted in the tapestry. The figure of Death at lower right launching his

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figure 24: Gillis Mostaert, Haywain. Paris, Musée de Louvre. Photo: RenéGabriel Ojéda. © Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

spear at a man would be more appropriate in a Triumph of Death than in a Triumph of Greed, and the demons cavort quite openly among their victims. While the basic composition of the tapestry, a circular main scene against a square or rectangular field teeming with hellish monsters, recalls the reverse of Bosch’s St. John on Patmos (Berlin, Staatliche Museen) and the Christ Crowned with Thorns in El Escorial, it was also favored in paintings now judged to be by Bosch imitators, such as the Passion Triptych at Valencia and various copies of The Stone of Folly.59 As for the devilinfested waters, which Bosch employed in the right inner panel of the Lisbon St. Anthony triptych and in a Temptation of St. Anthony in the Prado, Madrid,60 a similar hellish sea appears in a print, St. Christopher and the Christ Child, by Bosch’s contemporary Alart du Hameel,61 and was en­ thusiastically taken up by Bosch’s followers in numerous depictions of St. Christopher and the Temptation of St. Anthony.62

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figure 25: Attributed to Gillis Mostaert, Haywain. Utrecht, Rijksmuseum Het Catharijneconvent. © Museum Catharijneconvent Utrecht.

Whoever designed it, the basic composition of the Haywain tapestry recurs in a painting by Gillis Mostaert (Fig. 24), but with numerous changes. The painting reverses the tapestry composition, the crowd of sinners wears fashions current after midcentury, and the three frolicking monsters atop the hay cart have been replaced with three male nudes, perhaps devils themselves, holding aloft tufts of hay.63 Much the same composition appears in a second painting attributed to Mostaert (Fig. 25) but adjusted to fill a long rectangular format; the figure groups also deviate in numerous respects, and the framing orb and devil-infested sea have been omitted.64 Significantly, both paintings possess one detail we have encountered in the tapestry, the two figures bearing the “hay reliquary” on their shoulders.65

iii While the original cartoon of the Madrid tapestry was presumably made sometime before the French royal inventory of 1542, we cannot date Mostaert’s two paintings with any precision.66 Nor do we know their temporal or compositional relationship to the one haywain allegory that bears a date, an etching by the creator of the Blau Huicke, Frans Hogenberg,

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and issued in 1559 by an Antwerp colleague, the print publisher Bartholomeus de Mompere.67 Hogenberg seems to have taken a certain interest in proverb images: in addition to the Blau Huicke print, he produced an undated copy after Van Meckenem’s King David with Proverbial Sayings from the Psalms (see Fig. 7).68 In Hogenberg’s Al Hoy print (Fig. 26), the hay wagon resembles its counter­ part in the “Granvelle-Alva” tapestry, except that it bears the inscription “Al Hoy,” and the nobles and clergy do not follow the cart in a stately pro­ cession but snatch aggressively at its contents. Similarly, the three devils on top of the wagon in the tapestry are replaced by a lone devil who flourishes clumps of hay in a gesture of triumph, and a second devil rides one of the horses in front. The most striking departure from the tapestry design occurs in the surrounding landscape that provides the setting for twenty-nine isolated figure groups. Developing further the format he had employed for the Blau Huicke print produced a year or so earlier, Hogenberg numbered each figure group and provided it with an inscribed verse that varies from two to four lines. The verse marked number three, at top center, effectively sums up the whole print; roughly translated, it tells us that “Religious, laypeople, be it in whatever level of society, one finds faults at all times. Therefore you should do good and avoid the bad. Because otherwise (alas!) it is found to be al hoy.” Even more than Bosch, Hogenberg displays a great diversity of human follies, many inspired by proverbs and biblical parables. In addition to the unfortunate husband beaten by his wife, whose sad plight will be considered in the next chapter, we encounter the man who serves two masters, the man who sees the splinter in his brother’s eye but not the beam in his own, and the monk who hangs his cap on the garden gate as he abandons the cloisters. We also meet the koorenbyter (literally, “grain biter”), a term often applied to those who hoarded grain for specula­ tion. According to the accompanying verse, “It is a common proverb well known unto me, that the koorenbyters eat up the living poor.” We are warned that drunkards damage their health and diminish their goods, that we must always watch out for the devil who is out to trap us, and that

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figure 26: Frans Hogenberg, Al Hoy, 1559. Etching. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique.

it is forbidden to pray to strange gods. Churchmen are not spared: “It does not help the world if the spirituals fight with each other. It would be better that they were very quick, to teach and to reform all people’s sins.” And, “if the spirituals associate much with women, then they will rather sleep than study.” At the right is a tavern from which two women chase a youth clad only in his shirt; he admonishes us: “Take care that you do not go into the bordellos, because all my jewels have I left there. Now they pursue me naked through the streets,” an allusion, most likely, to the par­able of the prodigal son, a subject popular in Netherlandish art and drama of the period.69 Another parable appears at lower right, inscribed “If one blind man wants to lead the other, then they both fall into the ditch.” Several years later, in August 1563, and probably inspired by Hogen­ berg’s print, a comparable hay wagon was actually pulled through the streets of Antwerp. This occurred in the procession for the Feast of the Assumption whose new floats, as we have seen, excoriated the shortcomings of Elck. The pageant wagon bearing Old Deceit and her blue cloaks was

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preceded by a Hoywaghen ridden by a sater, or satyr (most probably a devil with hooves, much as Hogenberg had represented him), called Bedrie­ ghelijck aenlocken (Alluring deceit). This wagon was followed by “all nations of folk pulling at the hay, such as usurers, bankers, peddlers, etc., showing that earthly gain is all hay.”70 The Ordinantie of 1563 ends with Een nie[u]w Liedeken, “a new song” whose verse for the second float tells us that Elck will pull and pluck; he takes more gladly than he gives, but in the end it is Al Hoy.71 However, it was Frans’s brother, Remigius Hogenberg, who created the most original reworking of Bosch’s Haywain (Fig. 27).72 His etching shows a rustic landscape through which rolls a horse-drawn cart heaped high this time, not with hay, but with turnips. Perched on this pile of vegetables, a man plays a bagpipe and a woman plucks a lute; behind them looms a mysterious personage concealed beneath a huge cloak. This last figure may be a woman, for she grasps in one hand a common feminine attribute, the distaff visible just above the bagpiper at the left.73 Behind the cart trails a little band of people who pluck turnips from the wagon and gather them from the ground. In the foreground, other people carry bags and baskets of turnips or fight for them, while at lower right, several women, possibly nuns, boil turnips under the supervision of a corpulent monk. Behind his chair another woman sits with distaff and bobbin; perhaps she “spins a bad thread,” a proverbial phrase describing the behavior of adulterous wives and other women of loose morals,74 in which case she may well be the monk’s concubine. Despite the rather slapdash etching style, the figures are not without a certain vivacity, especially evident in the monk and his companions. The substitution of a horse and rider for Bosch’s demons to pull the cart perhaps recalls the tapestry variant, but the print and tapestry have no other features in common, and Remigius may well have been familiar with Bosch’s original composition in some form. Without repeating any figures exactly, he adapted from Bosch the group of monk and nuns, as well as the two men struggling in an open area in the foreground. How­ ever, he eliminated the diabolical elements introduced by Bosch and

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figure 27: Remigius Hogenberg, The Turnip Wagon. Etching. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique.

simplified and altered the composition in many details, for example, substituting a cozy view of the countryside for Bosch’s far-flung panorama. Most striking, however, is his transformation of the proverbial hay into turnips. Like hay, of course, the humble turnip is common, small in worth—“Not worth a turnip,” as an old proverb has it75—and thus could easily signify the basic worthlessness of temporal goods. However, Remi­ gius had a more cogent motive for this change. His turnips represent a pun on two Netherlandish words, current at least from the sixteenth century, the noun rapen, plural of raap or “turnip,” and the verb rapen, mean­ ing “to gather or scrounge,” often in the unfavorable sense of pilfering and plundering.76 This range of meanings is conveyed unambiguously in the little verse inscribed beneath the image: “Elck is wtte om rapen by nachte[n] by daghen, gheestelijck weerlijck het syn wijf oft man, sy trecken sy plucken al vanden waghen, hy heet schier debeste die meest rapen can.”

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Translated, these lines inform us that “Everyone is out to scrounge [rapen] by night, by day; religious, laity, be it woman or man; they pull, they pluck all from the wagon; he is quickly the best who can gather up the most.”77 This inscription expands on a popular expression that can also be found in several mock New Year’s prognostications issued in Antwerp during this period. In one such pamphlet, published for 1528, it is predicted that in the month of October, “the [common] people will begin to scrounge [rapen uut] and who can scrounge the most, will have the most.”78 In a prognostication from about 1540, we are informed that this world “is now mostly ruled by rapen,” and further, “who robs [raept] the most, shall be the most exalted,” from which we may see “that he who does not [rapen] will have little profit.”79 The peculiar virtues of this vegetable had been celebrated at considerable length some years before Remigius’s etching, in one of the poems collected about 1524 by the Utrecht vicar Jan van Stijevoort. 80 The poem lists those who are out to rapen, who turn out to be all who are born of Adam: pope and bishop, abbot and deacon, emperor, king, lords, all nobility, priests, canons, and clerks, judges and lawyers, tradesmen and farmers, everyone, in fact, is out to grab as much as he can. Therefore, each verse concludes with the refrain “turnips must certainly be a healthy food” [rapen moet wel syn een ghsonde spijs], explaining why they were so avidly sought after. A significant part of the poem’s humor for contemporary readers, I suspect, would have derived from the image it evokes of even the high and mighty chasing desperately after turnips, for this vegetable, like onions and garlic, was considered a food fit chiefly for peasants (although at least one cookbook, published at Antwerp in 1560, includes several recipes for turnips). 81 Thus, two turnips lie in the foreground of Wierix’s Drunken Peasant Pushed into a Pigsty (see Fig. 41), and when the Antwerp artist Marten van Cleve painted a peasant kitchen interior about 1555– 60, he included a pile of carrots and turnips, as well as a few parsnips,

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prominently in the foreground. 82 Remigius also alluded to this associa­ tion between peasants and turnips in another print, The Peasant in the Tavern, depicting a game of trictrac (a form of backgammon) between a haughty courtesan and a simple peasant; the former urges her bewildered opponent to make his next move with the mocking words, “Go ahead, you clodhopper, learn to cut turnips.”83 We do not know if Remigius was familiar with Stijevoort’s poetic en­ comium of the turnip; the Utrecht vicar’s collection of refereinen remained unpublished until the twentieth century, but the etcher may have en­ countered the turnip poem elsewhere. Even so, the traditional denigration of the turnip as peasant fare may account for his omission of the princes and high churchmen who figure so prominently in Bosch’s Haywain, as well as in the tapestry variant and the related paintings by Mostaert. On the contrary, the people who scramble for turnips seem to be in modest circumstances, including the monk and the nuns, and their greed is aptly epitomized by the pig that thrusts its snout from under the lean-to attached to the farmhouse in the right distance. 84 The group on top of the turnip wagon was perhaps inspired by the lovers perched on Bosch’s Haywain (see Fig. 19), but Remigius may also have been drawing on further aspects of turnip lore. For one thing, the ex­pression gheneucht rapen at this time meant “to enjoy,” “to take pleasure in.” The phrase Wy rapen gheneucht (We enjoy ourselves), in fact, was the motto of a Delft rederijker kamer whose members freely employed the turnip as an emblem of their chamber. 85 Furthermore, the turnip had long been known as an aphrodisiac. This was the opinion recorded by both Pliny and the anonymous writer of an early-sixteenth-century text, Der Vrouwen natuer,86 and is alluded to in the encomium on turnips in Stijevoort’s col­ lection: “it heals those who are sick in the borse,” or “purse,” probably refer­ ring to the male genitals. 87 Hence we may assume that the couple indulges in fleshly pleasures, a supposition reinforced by the lantern dangling from a pole thrust into the turnip pile: lanterns were generally associated with carnival revelry and dissipation. 88 Moreover, the bagpipe played by the

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man traditionally carried erotic overtones due to its phallic shape, while music making in general often served as a metaphor for lovemaking. 89 But who is the enigmatic figure encompassing the two revelers within her voluminous cloak? She recalls the figure of Old Deceit who, as we have seen, rode triumphantly in the famous Antwerp Elck procession of 1563 accompanied by her followers covered in blue cloaks. If Remigius has shown us another Outbedroch, then the revelers might be understood as deceiving themselves with the carnal pleasures of this world, indeed, much as the lovers serenaded by the blue devil on top of Bosch’s hay cart. The Turnip Wagon bears neither date nor publisher’s address, but the monogram “RHB” inscribed on a rock near the lower border of the print, just right of center, allows us to attribute it to Remigius Hogenberg. Remigius was born in Malines about 1536, several years before his brother Frans, but little is known about his career until about 1567, when he and Frans fled the Netherlands to escape the tyranny of the duke of Alva. Thereafter Remigius apparently worked extensively in France and England until his death about 1588.90 The Turnip Wagon probably is datable to the earlier part of his career. The inscription in Netherlandish, includ­ing a pun that would have been unintelligible in most other lan­ guages,91 suggests that the print was made for an exclusively Netherlandish audience. It must therefore have been executed sometime between the mid-1550s, when he presumably began his career, and his self-imposed exile in 1567.

iv Thus from at least the 1540s on, Bosch’s haywain allegory enjoyed a considerable revival in the Netherlands. It was the ultimate prototype, apparently, for a tapestry design, an allegorical pageant wagon, several paintings, and two etchings. At least three other hay allegories, however, apparently owe little if anything to Bosch: the figures and incidents are considerably reduced in number, and the cart has disappeared. One image in this group is an engraving first brought to our attention by Paul Vandenbroeck (Fig. 28); bearing neither date nor signature, it is probably

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of Netherlandish origin, done around midcentury.92 The middle ground is occupied by a large haystack on whose summit Christ sits, flanked on either side by a pair of angels, each pair brandishing a sword in both hands. These vengeful agents of the Lord may call to mind traditional Last Judgment scenes, but Christ spreads his hands, not to reveal the wounds of his Passion, but rather, it seems, to display the goeden hopper hoys he has bestowed on humanity, very much as God is described as doing in the fifteenth-century Al Hoy poem.93 However, no one actually has secured any hay, although several people approach the mound with arms stretched out as if to seize some. In the center, men and women fight among themselves, upsetting a basket of eggs, a large jug, and a pot of coins in their struggle, while near them one man holds a great lantern. At lower right three men, apparently blind, are led by a small dog. Opposite this group sit two men, perhaps scholars or state officials to judge from their dress; a third man stands over them. On the ground nearby is a bag bearing an inscribed label on which can be read the letters “confus.” If it is the beginning of the now obsolete Netherlandish word confusie, that is, “confusion,”94 its significance within the print remains obscure, but it aptly describes the response of modern viewers to this image, and not the least confusing are the heavy cloaks worn or held by a number of the figures. These may be like the cloaks that Outbedroch bestowed on her followers in the Elck procession of 1563, hence a symbol of selfdeceit. While the overall message seems to be clear—a condemnation of human greed—its details resist interpretation. Without inscriptions on the print, we can only speculate as to what its designer wanted to convey to his audience. The two drawings in this group, done probably in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, are fortunately much more straightforward in content. One is an undated sheet attributed to Adriaen Pietersz Crabeth, an artist from Gouda who ended his days in Autun (Fig. 29).95 The cir­ cular composition shows a large mound of hay surrounded by men and women, among them burghers, peasants, and a monk, who are occupied chiefly in stuffing the hay into bags or tying it into bundles. From the

figure 28: Netherlandish, Hay Allegory, ca. 1550. Etching. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique.

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figure 29: Attributed to Adriaen Pietersz Crabeth, Al Hoy. Drawing. Vienna, Graphische Sammlung Albertina.

center of a small mound of hay, scarcely visible among the crowd of figures, rises a pole on which perches a large bird, its identity suggested by the Latin inscription on the banderole fluttering beneath: translated it reads “Ha, ha, ha, I am not the only greedy vulture?”96 Although Cra­ beth’s drawing has almost nothing in common with Bosch’s Haywain, he may have known the tapestry variant, for he shows pope, emperor, and other dignitaries to the left of the haystack and as in the tapestry, and while they stand rather than ride (as in Bosch’s version), they remain aloof from the frenetic activity around them. Rather more original is the second of the Al Hoy drawings (Fig. 30),

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figure 30: Frans Pourbus the Elder, It Is All Hay, 1575. Drawing. New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, Egmont Collection, Yale Library Transfer.

this one by the Bruges artist Frans Pourbus the Elder and dated 1575.97 The composition is dominated by a large haystack, but in this case only a few people pluck from it. In the foreground, a grinning fool feeds hand­f uls of hay to two eager recipients, a cardinal and a soldier; in the middle ground, a second fool thrusts a pitchfork laden with hay toward an openmouthed woman who stands with hands on hips in the familiar pose of the scolding wife (see Fig. 55). Specifically anti-Catholic sentiment is

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perhaps reflected in the prominence of the cardinal in Pourbus’s drawing and the pope and his entourage in the sheet by Crabeth, but like the al hoy and rapen allegories we have considered, these two haystacks castigate the greed and folly of all humanity. Since the traditional hay cart is missing, it may be that both drawings owe something to the old poem Vanden hopper hoeys, but this remains uncertain.98 In any case, to judge from their circular format, these two sheets may have been designed as patterns for painted-glass roundels, particularly in the case of Crabeth’s drawing: the Crabeth family was well known for its designs for paintedand stained-glass windows.99 As we have seen, proverbs had been recommended by Erasmus as fit subjects for household decoration, including windows, and in this connection may be mentioned a fragment of a painted-glass roundel (Utrecht, Rijksmuseum Catharijneconvent), probably not after Crabeth and differing in composition from either drawing, but showing a group of people snatching handfuls from a large stack of hay.100

v Confronted by this proliferation of hay allegories, particularly in the second half of the sixteenth century, we may well ask why the subject was so popular just at this time. It is due in part, to be sure, to the up­ surge after 1550 of interest in Boschian themes in general, most likely sparked by Hieronymus Cock, who published a number of prints in­ scribed “Hieronymus Bos inventor,” or some variant thereof, as well as the Boschian subjects designed by Pieter Bruegel. The earliest dated Boschian print by Bruegel is Big Fish Eat the Little Fish of 1557 (Fig. 31); although the original drawing still exists, bearing Bruegel’s name and dated the previous year, the inscription on the print attributes its “invention” to Bosch.101 After this time, however, Bruegel’s designs in the Boschian mode were published under his own name. Other anonymous prints in the style of Bosch, undated and carrying only the address “Aux Quatre Vents,” were probably issued after Cock’s death in 1570. 102

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figure 31: After Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Big Fish Eat the Little Fish, 1557. Engraving. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1917 (17.3.859). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Although Cock dedicated several print series to Granvelle,103 they do not include any of the Boschian prints, and we are unsure if Granvelle’s Boschian tapestry series or, more likely, the original cartoons suggested to Cock that such subjects might appeal to a broader public or, conversely, that the publication of Cock’s Boschian prints stimulated Granvelle’s interest in Bosch. In any case, the popularity of the hay allegory in this period goes beyond the Bosch “revival” in general. Eyghenbaet and giericheyt (selfishness and avarice), the pursuit of private profit and pleasure at the expense of the common welfare: these had long been seen as the besetting sins in the wealthy, worldly society of sixteenth-century Netherlands, whose commerce, banking, and industry played an important role in the Europe of its time.104 These shortcomings are criticized, for example, in two allegorical dramas

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by the Bruges playwright Cornelis Everaert: Sanders Welfaren, a plea to consider the welfare of others, first performed in 1511; and the much later Crygh, whose title, a Netherlandish word meaning both “war” and “greed,” eloquently conveys its message of violence and selfishness.105 But the message of Bosch’s Haywain and haystack imagery in general would have been particularly meaningful in the years after 1550, when the flourish­ ing economy of Antwerp, and of the Netherlands as a whole, began to suffer reverses. A decline in commerce and industry was accompanied by demands for increased taxes from Philip II. In 1557 the Spanish crown converted its public debts into state bonds paying lower interest rates, and the cities of Brabant and other Netherlandish provinces soon followed suit. An economic upswing following the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis concluded between Spain and France in 1559 slowed down but could not halt the general decline that recommenced in the early 1560s.106 This financial crisis was exacerbated in 1564–65 by a scarcity of grain, due in part to crop failures in France and the disruption in trade with the Baltic area, the major sources of this staple for the Netherlands. The resultant inflation in the price of bread and other wheat products inspired Het Cooren, a play completed in 1565 by Lauris Jansz, factor of the Haarlem chamber De Wijngaertrancken.107 A furious attack on the koorenbyter, the grain speculator that Frans Hogenberg had included in his Al Hoy print of 1559, the play features two grain merchants, appropriately named In­ satiable Greed and Nevermore Enough. In their plot to hoard grain so as to profit from rising prices, these men turn a deaf ear to the pleas of the poor who can no longer afford to eat. Het Cooren herself, grain personified, explains that she was created for rich and poor alike, and God did not intend for her to be exploited by the “great cats” [ groote catten] who are never satisfied, a complaint, incidentally, much in the tenor of the fifteenthcentury Al Hoy poem.108 The victims of these troubled times undoubtedly attributed their mis­ fortunes not only to greedy merchants but also to those farmers and priests, everyone, in short, who indulged in eyghenbaet and giericheyt. “Wealth does not check greed,” as a current proverb had it,109 and the public could point

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to at least two men who seemed to be Greed’s very personifications. One was the director of fortifications and former Antwerp burgomaster Michiel van der Heyden, who was accused in 1549 of diverting men, material, and public funds from the rebuilding of the city walls to the reconstruction of Crauwels, his luxurious country house just outside Antwerp.110 The other was Jean Noirot, Antwerp mint master and faithless husband, whose bankruptcy and flight resulted in the forced auction in 1572 of all his household goods, including, as it happens, one of the finest picture collections of his day.111 It is no wonder, then, that eyghenbaet and giericheyt were uppermost in the public mind. Two proverbs from the Adages of Erasmus—“Profit smells good whatever it comes from” and “Everything bows to money”—would probably have never seemed more apt than they did then.112 When the Violieren chamber of Antwerp organized the great Landjuweel of 1561, its members drew up a list of questions from which one would be chosen, subject to government approval, for dramatic treatment by the participating chambers. Among them were such topical issues as How is it that everything daily becomes more expensive? Why does a greedy rich man covet more wealth? and How can one best extirpate the usurer?113 None of these questions was selected, most likely because they were considered politically too sensitive; nevertheless, one of the poems presented at the Landjuweel castigated the dishonest merchant who op­ presses the poor for his own profit.114 Hieronymus Cock was also quick to exploit these concerns in several prints that he published after Pieter Bruegel, beginning with Big Fish Eat the Little Fish of 1557 (see Fig. 31).115 A similar comment is offered in the undated Battle of the Savings Pots and Money Chests (Fig. 32), in which animated savings pots, moneybags, strongboxes, and the like are locked in mortal combat for material gain.116 Infinitely more complex is another print after Bruegel, Elck of 1558 (Fig. 33), in which a myopic old man appears a number of times in the same composition as he picks through a jumble of boxes, barrels, and other vanities of the world, acting out the proverb “Each seeks himself in the world.”117 Two of his counterparts at upper left strive against each

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figure 32: After Pieter Bruegel, Battle of the Savings Pots and Money Chests. Etching and engraving, 2nd state. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1925 (26.72.40). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

other for the possession of a long piece of twisted cloth; this is an allusion to the proverb “To pluck the longest straw,” that is, as Andriessoon explains, “each seeks his own profit,”118 the straw (hoy) being, as we have seen, an apt symbol of the intrinsic worthlessness of what they seek. Bruegel included another variant of this proverb in his Netherlandish Proverbs of 1559, where two men tug at opposite ends of a large pretzel (see Fig. 3).119 Further commentary in Elck is offered by the picture-withina-picture on the back wall; it is based on the famous injunction Know thyself, which, as noted earlier, is one of those adages not particularly easy to visualize as a proverbe en action. Bruegel, however, tackled this prob­ lem with considerable ingenuity. Reversing the proverb, so to speak, to Nobody knows himself, the words inscribed just above the lower edge of the frame, he shows a man standing amid a pile of household junk: He is

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figure 33: Attributed to Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Elck, 1558. Engraving and etching. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

Nemo, or Nobody, the imaginary character traditionally blamed for broken pitchers and the like (“Nobody did it!”), who contemplates his image in a mirror.120 This reversal of Know thyself was not unique to Bruegel; as we have seen, it would be given an ironic twist by the fool Jeurken in the Antwerp Landjuweel of 1561.121 Nevertheless, Elck is one of Bruegel’s most inspired proverb images, and its basic message would be repeated five years later in the famous Elck procession held at Antwerp in 1563, along with Old Deceit binding Everyman with the Blue Cloak, and her colleague Alluring Deceit perched on the hay wagon.122

vi The Eighty Years’ War, with its persecutions, its constant jostling of various religious factions for supremacy, and a host of other tribulations,

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figure 34: Jacques Horenbault, Al Hoy, 1608. Engraving. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. © Rijksmuseum-Stichting Amsterdam.

ensured that the message of the haystack did not become irrelevant. The Al Hoy proverb occurs in Johannes David’s collection of proverb rhymes published at Antwerp in of 1606,123 and in several tafelspelen (banquet plays), hay is included among the various symbolic gifts offered to the assembled company.124 In an early-seventeenth-century carnival play, De Vasten en de Vastenavont (Lent and Shrove Tuesday), the pancakes, waffles, and sausages that carnival presses on the audience (“because Carnival comes but once a year!”) are derided by Lent as “al hoey” (only hay).125 In Die­rick de Smet’s play Al Hoy, undated but written around the turn of the seventeenth century, the dramatis personae bear the picturesque but descriptive names Idle Lust, Willeken Never Enough, and Belly Seldom Full.126 The good things promised by this dubious trio turn out to be nothing more than hay. Hogenberg’s Al Hoy print of 1559 was reworked in reverse almost a generation later, about 1583, by one of the Van

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figure 35: Follower of Sebastian Vrancx, Netherlandish Proverbs. Brussels, Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium (inv. 3301). Photo: © IRPA-KIK, Brussels.

Doetecum brothers, this time with inscriptions in German, 127 and revised again still later by Jacques Horenbault in a print dated 1608 (Fig. 34).128 In Horenbault’s print, the middle foreground is dominated by a pair of lovers, the foppish young man serenading the very personification, it seems, of Superbia, a proud and elegantly garbed lady proffering a tuft of hay to her companion. Hay’s alter ego, the turnip, appears in at least one tafelspel. In the Den Man en ’t Sotte Kint (The Man and the Foolish Child), an undated Twelfth Night play, the two actors offer the audience “that very best vegetable that one may find in the world, that is, the turnip” as a symbol of greed, although in an unusual twist at the end of the play, rapen are made to signify the avidity with which we seek the salvation of our souls.129 The turnip also appears in one of the most ambitious assembly of proverbs within a single framework to have survived (Fig. 35), a painting usually attributed to Sebastian Vrancx but probably by a follower. Jutting out from the building at the right (Fig. 36), an enormous imperial orb is balanced on a minuscule turnip, symbolizing this lowly vegetable’s universal dominion over humanity; the presence of this motif only reinforces the signboard visible just under the building’s roof, inscribed “Proverbs of the world’s abuse that one names the Blue Cloak.”130

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figure 36: Detail of Fig. 35.

Eyghenbaet and giericheyt were also treated by the Dutch artist and writer Adriaen van de Venne, famous especially for his satirical grisaille paintings.131 In four of these pictures, he introduced the figure of a man selling turnips, apparently his own invention. In one painting (Fig. 37), dated 1644 and inscribed “Elck is om raepen uyt” (Everyone is out to steal), the turnip hawker is surrounded by a throng of people busily scrounging for his wares. 132 In two other panels, the turnip seller trundles his laden wheelbarrow through an eager crowd or upturns a basket of turnips before a crowd of folk who scramble to grab as many as they can.133 In a fifth grisaille, Van de Venne also depicted the hay allegory (Fig. 38). Inscribed “Elck treckt om ’t langst” (Everyone pulls for the longest [straw]), a proverb that Bruegel had illustrated in his Elck (see Fig. 33), the painting shows a hay wagon pulled by two horses, as men, women, and children swarm around, snatching at the hay mound or struggling for bits

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figure 37: Adriaen van de Venne, Elck is om raepen uyt, 1644. Warsaw, Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie. Photo: Piotr Ligier.

of it among themselves.134 The differentiation of types recalls several scenes of earlier haywain allegories, including Bosch’s triptych in the Prado and Hogenberg’s Al Hoy print (see Figs. 17, 26). An innovation, however, is the woman seated on top of the hay cart. The imperial globe balanced on her head identifies her as Vrouw Wereld (Lady World),135 while the elaborate vessel she holds aloft perhaps alludes to the “cup of abomination” carried by the Whore of Babylon in many scenes of the Apocalypse.136 In contrast to this hay allegory, Van de Venne’s turnip scenes tend to be simpler in composition; absent for the most part is the great diversity of social types and activities typical of most of the earlier hay allegories. Much in the vein of his predecessor Remigius Hogenberg (see Fig. 27), Van de Venne settles for generalized rustic figures (again, perhaps influenced by the turnip’s reputation as a staple of the peasant

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figure 38: Adriaen van de Venne, Elck treckt om ’t langst. Location unknown. Photo: RKD, The Hague.

diet), interspersed with an occasional soldier or elegantly dressed observer amused by the spectacle. Van de Venne’s twilight scenes of human greed signal the end of hay and turnip allegories—but not quite.137 As a final example, Vanden­broeck cites an etched title page to Cornelis Udemans’s Verkeerde Werelt, a moral­ izing treatise on the topsy-turvy world published at Middelburgh in 1660 (Fig. 39).138 It shows a hay wagon pulled by two horses whose headgear, a sun and a crescent moon respectively, identifies them as embodiments of Day and Night. Time drives the wagon on which perches Death himself, bearing a scythe and presiding tri­umphantly over a sparse group of people, among them a crowned figure and a soldier, who seek to pull hay from the cart or walk away into the distance with handfuls of it. The scene is enclosed within a stylized imperial sphere, a motif recalling the tapestry variant of Bosch’s Hay­wain (see Fig. 23); the corners are occupied, however, not by devils as in the tapestry, but by winged cherub heads. The accom­ panying poem counsels us: “See here what this print teaches, That the

figure 39: Al Hoy. Title page to Cornelis Udemans, Verkeerde Werelt (Middelburg: Pieter van Goetthem, 1660). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. © RijksmuseumStichting Amsterdam.

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whole world is upside down, And that Time, as wagon-man, Brings the hay with Death,” and concludes that earthly goods are honors that are “nought but hay and foul dung” [maer niet dan Hoy en vuyle mis]. Although human greed and rapacity hardly disappeared after the publication of this print, later generations found other images to drive home the same lessons that had been so effectively conveyed by Bosch’s Haywain and the hay and turnip allegories that it inspired.

chapter four

loquacious pictures Twelve Emblematic Proverb Engravings

., Truly a silent picture is a loquacious thing. —er asmus

i If Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs in Berlin (see Fig. 1) and his other proverb depictions have long been the subjects of extensive study,1 a related group of images has suffered relative neglect, probably because its con­ nection to Bruegel himself is unclear. This is the so-called Twelve Proverbs, a suite of undated engravings (Fig. 40), which were described in detail by the Belgian scholar Louis Lebeer some years ago.2 Although probably not designed by Bruegel, they merit closer attention, not only for their intrinsic interest but because together with their inscribed verses they illuminate the often close relation between proverb pictures and contemporary emblem books, a popular literary genre that similarly combined words and images. The later history of at least one of the compositions in the Twelve Proverbs also illustrates how the meaning of a proverb image could be altered to reflect changing historical conditions. Seven of the Twelve Proverbs carry the monogram of the Antwerp engraver Jan Wierix, who lived from 1549 to sometime after 1618.3 The other five are unmarked but are occasionally attributed to a different artist, usually to one of Wierix’s colleagues, Pieter van der Heyden, who

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engraved many prints for Hieronymus Cock. It is usually assumed that the whole series was done about 1568, in the early years of Jan’s career, an assumption based on another print that shows a drunken peasant being pushed into a pigsty (Fig. 41): it bears Wierix’s monogram and the date 1568, along with the inscription “P. Bruegel inve[ni]t.”4 This print may well reproduce an authentic Bruegel invention; a painted tondo showing the same composition has recently been shown to contain a fragment of Bruegel’s signature and the date 1557.5 But while Wierix’s Drunken Peasant Pushed into a Pigsty is similar in format and only slightly larger in diameter than the Twelve Proverbs, it cannot be considered as part of that series, for it lacks any verses commenting on the subject matter and its execution is coarser in style. In any case, Wierix’s Twelve Proverbs were almost certainly first published before 1585. In their figure style, this suite of prints shows some affinities with that of Bruegel, and the circular format recalls his Twelve Proverbs in Antwerp, probably painted in the early 1560s (Figs. 10, 42). In composition, however, Bruegel’s painted roundels are much simpler than the Twelve Proverbs print series; the latter come closer to such pictures as The Misan­ thrope (see Fig. 44) or The Peasant and the Nest Robber,6 both of 1568, the same date usually assigned to the print series. Especially similar are the fairly extensive landscape backgrounds that appear in several of the Twelve Proverbs (see Figs. 43, 45, 54). It is possible that the prints were done directly after Bruegel’s own designs, perhaps in the form of drawings found in the studio after his death. Yet none of the drawings usually connected with this series can be attributed to Bruegel himself; in fact, the drawings are now generally considered to be derived from the prints.7 Conversely, except for The Misanthrope, the Twelve Proverbs may represent the original inventions of Wierix and his collaborator, if indeed there was one. The intervention of a second artist is equally problematic, as the chief difference discernible between the two groups is that the prints bearing Wierix’s name have inscriptions in Netherlandish and French, whereas the others have verses in Flemish only. The French inscriptions are only half as long as the

figure 40: Jan Wierix, Twelve Proverbs. Engravings. For larger versions and full credits, see the individual images and their captions (following).

figure 41: Jan Wierix, Drunken Peasant Pushed into a Pigsty, 1568. Engraving. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. © Rijksmuseum-Stichting Amsterdam.

figure 42: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Falling between Two Stools. Detail of Fig. 10.

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Netherlandish ones, to which they are related in one of two ways. They either repeat more succinctly the gist of the Netherlandish verses, or they emphasize some aspect of the images not covered in the Netherlandish inscriptions.

ii The proverbs depicted in this print series offer cynical observations on the ways of the world. Four of their subjects were also treated by Bruegel: The Misanthrope, The Blind Leading the Blind, Man Warming Himself at a Neighbor’s Burning House, and Archer Shooting All His Arrows. In The Misanthrope (Fig. 43), the two figures closely resemble their counterparts in Bruegel’s painting of the same subject in Naples (Fig. 44), although Wierix has allotted the windmill a more prominent role in his composition. If he has also omitted the three caltrops, or spiked mantraps, that lie on the ground before the hooded figure in Bruegel’s painting, 8 he has made the latter’s tranquil landscape more menacing: instead of the shepherd and his flock, we now see a group of men attacking a covered wagon,9 a gallows in the farther distance, as well as ominous storm clouds gathering in the sky. The Netherlandish verses tell us that the main figure “wears mourning because the world is unfaithful. Most people employ the least right and reason, few live now as they should live. People rob, men grab, everyone is full of feigned morals,” a sentiment summarized by the French inscrip­ tion, perhaps restating a proverb: “I wear mourning, seeing the world in which so many deceits abound.”10 While the man in mourning thus bewails the perfidy of the world, evoked by the attack on the wagon and the gallows beyond, he fails to notice that his purse is being stolen. Crouching within an imperial globe, traditional symbol of universal dominion and hence of the world itself, the cutpurse is brother to the fellow making his way through the world that we have already encountered in an anonymous Netherlandish panel of 1510–15 (see Fig. 11). Illustrating the cynical expression “He who would make his way through this world must bend,” this fellow became especially ubiquitous after the mid-sixteenth century; he pops up in Hogenberg’s

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figure 43: Jan Wierix, The Misanthrope. Engraving. From the Twelve Proverbs. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. © Rijksmuseum-Stichting Amsterdam.

Blau Huicke print and the copies that it inspired,11 and Bruegel included one of these “creepers through the world” in his Netherlandish Proverbs (see Fig. 3, lower left), this time shown as a cripple, perhaps an allusion to his moral state. He also appears as the center of an elaborate allegory in several Netherlandish drawings12 and was featured in a number of festive processions held in Brabant during this period.13 It is probable that the thief preying on the Misanthrope has a comparable meaning.14 Thus, in both the print and Bruegel’s Misanthrope the ultimate message may well be that the man who turns away in disgust from the world puts himself in danger from those who all too easily accommodate themselves to its

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figure 44: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Misanthrope, 1568. Naples, Museo di Capodimonte. Photo: Courtesy of the Foto della Soprintendenza Speciale Polo Museale Napoletino.

evil ways. Indeed, as we are warned in the Kampen proverb book: “He who would have nothing to do with evil men must leave the world.”15 The Blind Leading the Blind (Fig. 45), inspired by Matthew 15:14, “if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the pit,” was depicted by Bruegel in his Netherlandish Proverbs (see Fig. 80), where we can just make out three stumbling figures silhouetted against a distant horizon in the middle, and more memorably in the five blind men in the painting now in Naples (Fig. 46). Probably the most frequently cited of Christ’s proverbial

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figure 45: Jan Wierix, The Blind Leading the Blind. Engraving. From the Twelve Proverbs. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique.

sayings, the blind leading the blind was frequently depicted in Bruegel’s day: they appear in Hogenberg’s Al Hoy (see Fig. 26)—although not in his Blau Huicke—as well as in a print of about 1550 by Cornelis Massys, and two engravings by Pieter van der Heyden, one naming Hieronymus Bosch as the “inventor,” the other after a design by Hans Bol and dated 1561.16 A poem by the fifteenth-century rederijker Anthonis de Roovere passes in review some of the ways in which the blind lead the blind, including negligent parents, inept teachers, and corrupt clergy who set bad examples for the laity.17 Not surprisingly, the parable of the blind

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figure 46: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Blind Leading the Blind, 1568. Naples, Museo di Capodimonte. Photo: Courtesy of the Foto della Soprintendenza Speciale Polo Museale Napoletino.

became a staple in the religious invective of the period: in a New Year’s referein published in 1567, for example, Anna Bijns evokes the parable when she appeals to God to open the eyes of those who have been blinded by heresy and “fall all of a sudden into the ditch.”18 Wierix’s print, however, avoids any direct reference to religious controversy, and, unlike Bruegel’s painting at Naples, it depicts only the two blind men implied in the parable. The Netherlandish verses (there is no French couplet) merely urge us to “Walk always with caution. Be faithful, trust nobody other than God in all things. Because when one blind man leads another, one sees that they fall together in the ditch.” The third proverb also depicted in Bruegel’s Berlin painting is the opportunist (Fig. 47), whose self-interest is condemned in the Nether­ landish inscription (again, there are no French verses): “He who greedily and without understanding seeks his own advantage, seeks everybody’s ruin without compassion. He cares not whose house burns so long as he can warm himself at the fire,” the latter sentence being a popular proverbial expression that also occurs in a rederijker play performed in 1607.19 Related to this is the Latin saying “It is your concern when next door’s wall is

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figure 47: Jan Wierix, Man Warming Himself at a Neighbor’s Burning House. Engraving. From the Twelve Proverbs. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique.

burning,” because, as Erasmus comments in his Adages, we should learn from the misfortune of others and look after our own affairs.20 The final proverb image in the “Bruegel” group shows the archer who shoots one arrow after another (Fig. 48); in his Berlin painting, Bruegel shows him perched on the roof of the tavern at the left (see Fig. 1, upper left). The expression “to shoot all one’s arrows” has been interpreted to mean depleting all one’s resources, to be left defenseless.21 However, this meaning is not borne out in the inscriptions on the print. According to the French couplet, “He who gives often and without success, sends one arrow after another,”22 while the Netherlandish lines tell us, “Yes, one

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figure 48: Jan Wierix, Archer Shooting All His Arrows. Engraving. From the Twelve Proverbs. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. © Rijksmuseum-Stichting Amsterdam.

gives much and sees neither help nor profit. It is no wonder that this sorrows most everyone. What use is it that one holds to neither order nor measure, but one shoots one arrow after another.” Rather closer in sentiment to these two verses is a proverb in Erasmus’s Adages: “You are shooting at heaven,” which, the author explains, characterizes people who toil in vain. 23 This well describes the archer in Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs, who shoots his arrows skyward, 24 but Wierix’s archer, wielding a crossbow (signaled by the winding device on the ground by his side), displays a similar futility by shooting his arrows at the step before the house. This deviation from the original proverb and the print may reflect

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figure 49: Jan Wierix, Every Merchant Praises His Own Wares. Engraving. From the Twelve Proverbs. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. © Rijksmuseum-Stichting Amsterdam.

an invention of the print’s designer, or perhaps an unknown variant of the proverb itself. We can only speculate.25 Bruegel did not include all of the Twelve Proverbs in the Berlin panel. Among those omitted, one illustrates “Every merchant praises his own wares.” This saying appears in the little dialogue between the two men in Figure 49, the letters A and B inscribed near their feet designating respectively the peddler and his heavyset skeptical companion. In the French verses, A boasts: “Here are nets, trumpets, and flutes; such goods you never have had,” to which B replies: “Go away, peddler, go away from here; and sell your goods somewhere else.” This exchange is largely re­

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peated in the Netherlandish verses, except that the skeptic ends by urging the peddler to “go and praise your wares somewhere else where people are still seeingly blind and hearingly deaf,” the last phrase probably an echo of Matthew 13:13: “seeing they see not, and hearing they hear not.”26 The skeptic does well to reject the peddler who evidently cheats: his flutes, nets, and trumpets were common symbols of deceit.27 In the famous Antwerp Everyman procession of 1563, Old Deceit wore a necklace of “trumpets and eyeglasses” and was accompanied by two peddlers hawking the same merchandise.28 Eyeglasses, too, were a symbol of deceit, and Andriessoon lists the expression “To sell eyeglasses” together with “To sell flutes” and “To sell eel skins,” all three referring to those, he explains, “who want to make-believe to other people about marvelous things and deceive them with these.”29 After all, according to Goedthals, “Every man is a thief in his own profession,”30 and a French proverb reminds us that “Each priest praises his own relics.”31 Rather more mystifying is the kaakspeler, or jawbone player (Fig. 50), who bows an oversize jawbone (possibly of a horse or mule) like a fiddle while sitting on another and even larger version of the same object. The low shoes and fur-trimmed mantle worn by this bizarre musician distinguish him as a man of some prominence, perhaps a government official.32 According to the French couplet, “He who has the means to receive plays well on the jawbone,” while the Flemish verses inform us that “It is good to be the receiver of the big payoff. He fills his purse and one praises his business. As long as his profit is big enough, he knows his story. He carries himself splendidly and plays on the jawbone.” A modern reader may find these lines rather cryptic, but in Bruegel’s day the word kaak meant both “jawbone” and “pillory”: to play on the jawbone was to acquire money or goods in an unlawful manner, and to sit on a jawbone was to be displayed in or on a pillory, that is, exposed to public view as a criminal.33 We have already encountered the kaakspeler in the Antwerp Landjuweel of 1561. He crops up even earlier, three times in the marginal decoration of a Dutch book of hours illuminated about 1456, and twice in the Hours of Mary of Burgundy, probably done in the 1480s, where he

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figure 50: Jan Wierix, Man Playing the Jawbone. Engraving. From the Twelve Proverbs. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. © Rijksmuseum-Stichting Amsterdam.

bows his instrument with a soup skimmer.34 In the right background of Wierix’s print can be discerned a second man playing a wind instrument of some sort within a large, open, lanternlike edifice; this structure was probably inspired by a type of contemporary pillory, the schandpaal (shame post), like the one erected about 1566 before the town hall of Woerden, not far from Utrecht.35 This detail plays on the other meaning of the word kaak as a synonym for “pillory,”36 thus identifying this musician, too, as a criminal. The same motif occurs in Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs (Fig. 51, center), where a man stands within a similar construction, this time bowing a stringed instrument.37

figure 51: The Viool Player. Detail of Fig. 1.

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figure 52: Jan Wierix, Drunken Fool Seated on an Egg. Engraving. From the Twelve Proverbs. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique.

The striking image of the fool perched astride a cracked egg, his head thrown back as he eagerly drains a large cup (Fig. 52), is explained by the accompanying verses: “Fie, you pot-bellied drunkard’s fool, always gobbling and guzzling full to the crop. Finding yourself on a dirty egg like a bauble [the fool’s mock scepter], finally ending up in the empty shell.” The fool is thus a bierbisschop, or “beer bishop,” who “celebrates the god Bacchus,” two expressions recorded in Andriessoon’s Duytsche adagia;38 he is also a devotee of St. Drincatibus (St. Drink), the mock pa­ tron saint of guzzlers who figures in various comic poems and tafelspelen plays of the period.39 Invariably, as the old adage puts is, “When drink is

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in, wit is out.”40 Nevertheless, the precise meaning of these verses remains elusive, although the significance of the image is fairly clear. It was inspired in part by a play on the Netherlandish word for egg yolk, door (also spelled dooier), and door, which in Bruegel’s time also meant “fool.” Hence, the expression “don’t set a fool on eggs,” which meant that he will only hatch out folly, since each egg contains a door (yolk), that is, a fool. 41 This proverb was also current in Bruegel’s day: although absent from Hogenberg’s Blau Huicke print, it was included in the imitations of this print issued in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. 42 In Wierix’s print, the same idea is conveyed by the fool’s bauble lying half-con­cealed in the egg. The Fool on an Egg would have had a particular sig­nificance for Netherlandish viewers, who along with their German neighbors had long been accused of overindulging in strong drink, a complaint voiced even by their countryman Erasmus. 43 More enigmatic is the man squatting with a moneybag held beneath his right arm (Fig. 53). He scatters coins on the ground as smaller figures crawl into a large opening in his backsides. As Jan Grauls has shown, this puzzling image illustrates the proverb iemand in zijn gat kruipen (to crawl into someone’s hole), roughly equivalent to our description of servile flatterers who kiss the same part of the anatomy. 44 If the significance of the print seems clear, the meaning is not conveyed by the accompanying verses. The French verse inscribed on the giant’s back tells us that “One does not know how to enter as one would like the hole of him who can give,” while according to the Flemish quatrain, “Whoever has money to give to high and low, and who lets [it] drip rather liberally from his treasure, receives official positions and comes into his own, because not everyone knows how to crawl into his hole.” In his Gemeene duytsche adagia, Symon Andriessoon had complained that people often cite proverbs without knowing precisely what they mean, 45 and if this is the case with the proverb now under discussion, then perhaps we will never grasp the full significance of the attached verses. Two of the Twelve Proverbs deal with the relationship between the sexes. In one image (Fig. 54) we see a frightened horse being pursued by a bale

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figure 53: Jan Wierix, Man with Moneybag and Flatterers. Engraving. From the Twelve Proverbs. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. © Rijksmuseum-Stichting Amsterdam.

of hay. As we have seen in the previous chapter, hay was one of the most enduring motifs of sixteenth-century Netherlandish satire, its intrinsic lack of worth aptly symbolizing the vanity of temporal goods and honors. But this is not the case here. The meaning of this hay image is suggested by the depiction of a second pursuit in the background, in which a man flees from a woman, and it is confirmed by the Flemish inscription: “Where the hay runs after the horse, that is wrong where it happens. Pay heed, you daughters, who woo so shamelessly. It does you no honor to court young men. But if the horse seeks the hay, that is fitting to your honor.”46 Women of marriageable age had traditionally been discouraged from pursuing the

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figure 54: Jan Wierix, The Hay Chasing the Horse. Engraving. From the Twelve Proverbs. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique.

young men of their choice. As Erasmus explained it, “it is no disgrace for a young man to go looking for a partner, but a girl cannot, and it does no great harm to his reputation if he fails, since she cannot marry more than one suitor. For this reason, whenever a girl has several suitors it would be better to leave the choice to her parents and thus reduce the chances of illfeeling against her.”47 According to Juan Luis Vives, “true virginity knows nothing of sexual union nor seeks after it and indeed does not even think of it. . . . Therefore when her parents are deliberating about her marriage, the young woman will leave all of that concern to those who wish as much good for her as she wishes for herself.” Her parents, after all, are experienced

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figure 55: Jan Wierix, The Henpecked Husband. Engraving. From the Twelve Proverbs. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. © Rijksmuseum-Stichting Amsterdam.

in this arena. 48 Several generations earlier, the Housebook Master had depicted the reverse situation in a lighthearted drawing in which maidens aggressively pursue young men. 49 Quite different is the relation between the sexes informing a second print (Fig. 55). Here we are encounter a domestic interior in which a woman stands over a seated and dejected-looking man. It requires no great labor to grasp the basic meaning of this image: the French couplet tells us that “a woman who scolds without reason makes nothing but trouble in the house.” But the treatment is rather more involved than these verses suggest. A hen and a rooster occupy the right foreground,

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while a monkey peers around the fireplace in the background. This print incorporates several proverbs, which are revealed in the Flemish inscrip­ tion: “A leaking roof and a smoking fireplace, yes, where the monkey sits at the hearth and looks around. A crowing hen, a nagging wife, are bad luck in a home, yes, troubles and sorrow.” These lines paraphrase the old and widespread proverb, “A leaking roof, a smoking chimney, and a nagging wife: these three things will drive a man from his house.” This saying can be found at least as early as the moralizing treatise On the Misery of the Human Condition, composed in 1195 by the future Pope Innocent III;50 it was repeated in Petrarch’s Remedies of Fortune Fair and Foul, twice by Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales, and at least once by the early-fifteenth-century writer Christine de Pizan in her Mutation of Fortune, to mention only a few examples from the Middle Ages.51 The hen and rooster would probably have called to the minds of contemporary viewers another proverb: “It is sad at home when the hen crows and the rooster does not.” This expression, incidentally, also appears in the proverb collections published by De Laet and Warnersen.52 The role of the monkey is not clear. A possible clue can be found in a collection of comic poems and farces published at Antwerp in 1600, but it is probably earlier in origin. In one of the verses we learn that “Cats, dogs, lions, and monkeys, all such ani­ mals may be tamed. But there is no one so wise who can tame a quar­relsome wife.”53 The visual catalogue of the world’s follies in Frans Hogenberg’s Al Hoy print of 1559 (see Fig. 26) includes a struggle between man and wife in the center foreground. The husband complains in the accompanying inscription that “In this manner my wife beats me, and to none can I complain. He who has an evil wife has much pain.” The inclusion of this couple in Hogenberg’s print would hardly have surprised contemporary viewers. “Good men commonly have bad wives,” we are warned in Goedthals’s proverb collection,54 and in an allegorical play written by the Bruges rederijker Cornelis Everaert about 1515, the husband Scamel Gemeente, Humble Commonality, is tormented by his quaet wyf (bad wife), appropriately named Trybulatie, Tribulation.55 Chau­ cer’s Wife of Bath boasts how she had mistreated her fourth husband:

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“That in his owene grece I made hym frye, For angre, and for verray jalousye. By God! in erthe I was his purgatorie, For which I hope his soule be in glorie.”56 This “wyfly purgatorie,” though, was not Chaucer’s inven­ tion; it was a misogynist joke of long standing.57 So, too, is the story of the henpecked husband who chooses to go to hell rather than join his wife in heaven; it appears in the Schimpf und Ernst (1522) by the German Franciscan Johannes Pauli and inspired a work by the Nuremberg poet and playwright Hans Sachs, Das weib jagt den man int hel, of 1551.58 Hogenberg’s quaet wyf most probably is not merely being quarrel­some but actively seeks to dominate her husband, striving, in fact, to “wear the pants in the family,” as a current American expression puts it. This struggle for the breeches was a favorite theme in the sixteenth century.59 It appears, for example, in a carnival play written by Hans Sachs in 1553: the husband is defeated by his wife who displays her trophies to the audience, boasting: “I have won the pants, the wallet and the sword; there­ fore I remain master in this house.”60 In the Netherlands, this marital struggle formed the subject of seven tafelspelen.61 Erasmus probably alludes to such a play in his colloquy The Feast of Many Courses, in which one of the characters recommends bringing in mimes and buffoons during the banquet to “put on some comic pantomime,” performing scenes from “everyday life” such as “a woman arguing with her husband over who’s boss.”62 Illustrated at least as early as the fourteenth century in the mar­ gins of several French manuscripts and later depicted in misericords across Europe,63 the struggle for the pants was also depicted in an anon­y­mous Netherlandish woodcut (Fig. 56). Dated 1555, it shows the de­feated hus­ band surrendering his pants to his wife who still threatens him with her fist; the moral of this unhappy episode is pointed out by the fool enter­ing from the left: “One finds no greater fools in the world than those who pull up their wives’ breeches.”64 In Wierix’s engraving (see Fig. 55), the woman has not yet pulled on her husband’s breeches, but the husband wears a dress protected by an apron,65 and there is no doubt that his wife has gained the “upper hand”; he has been vervyfd (verwijfd in modern Netherlandish), that is, emasculated

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figure 56: Netherlandish School, Husband Surrendering His Breeches to His Wife, 1555. Hand-colored woodcut. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. © Rijksmuseum-Stichting Amsterdam.

and forced to stay at home, clean the house, and cook, a subject to which the priest and rederijker poet Mathias de Castelein devoted a referein.66 Perhaps even worse, the unfortunate man has joined those who, as a mock New Year’s prognostication of about 1562 assures us, will hear many sermons from their wives even before attending church.67 None­ theless, as Erasmus advises us in his Adages, “what can’t be cured, must be endured,”68 a counsel followed, it would seem, by Wierix’s sad but sub­ missive husband. One other print in this series shows a man and woman (Fig. 57), but its meaning differs significantly from that of the previous two images. The inscription reads: “He who stuffs his peddler’s tray with deceit and thinks thus to win great riches, in truth he lodges with poverty and sitting by the bride scratches his head.” The print shows a woman seated in the traditional pose of the bride, with a bridal crown suspended above her before a cloth of honor, much as she appears, for example, in Bruegel’s Wedding Banquet in Vienna.69 Beside her on the bench is a peddler whose display case con­

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figure 57: Jan Wierix, Peddler Seated by the Bride. Engraving. From the Twelve Proverbs. Brussles, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique.

tains eyeglasses, which we have seen was a well-known symbol of deceit; thus, he is much like his colleague in Every Merchant Praises His Own Wares (see Fig. 49). Various explanations have been offered of this scene. Grauls sug­ gested that the peddler has expended much money and effort to deceive a young woman to win her hand, only to discover that she is as poor as he is.70 Adriaan J. Barnouw saw the dishonest merchant as cheating himself, for the bride will despise his wares at the wedding.71 The connection between the two figures cannot be explained in so straightforward a narrative fashion, however. As I have suggested elsewhere, “to sit by the bride” seems to have been a proverbial expression.72 Although I have yet to find it in any

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of the proverb collections published at this time, this expression inspired a factie, or satirical play, presented at the Antwerp Landjuweel of 1561 by the Groeijende Boom (Growing Tree) Chamber of Lier.73 Several feckless characters explain to the audience why they must “sit by the bride.” Lazi­ ness, stinginess, and improvidence are among the accomplishments that have earned them this distinction. The bride is named Vrouw (Lady) Schaeye, an epithet most likely derived from an old form of the Nether­ landish word schade, meaning “loss” and “detriment”; in Joos Lambrecht’s Netherlandish-French dictionary, published at Ghent in a second edition in 1562, schaey is translated as Dommage, that is, “damage, harm, injury.”74 Vrouw Schaeye, for her part, tells the audience that her friends sit beside her in sadness because they generally meet with misfortune in their affairs. Thus, “to sit by the bride” describes someone who suffers the consequences of his or her own folly, and this is most likely the fate of the peddler in the print, who claws distractedly at his head with both hands in a traditional gesture of confusion or disappointment. A less demon­strative variation of this gesture is employed by the peasant being cheated at a board game by a courtesan in the tavern scene etched by Remigius Hogenberg, pre­ viously mentioned; in its accompanying inscription, the peasant com­ plains in part, “I have missed my chance, lost my money. Thus I scratch my head.”75 A rather different sort of puzzle is encountered in the last print to be considered (Fig. 58), showing a robed figure standing before a door; his companion (or perhaps the same person repeated) stands in front of another door in the background. The French couplet says: “Now we are begging in vain, since we are crying at the door of a deaf person.” “To knock at the door of the deaf man” is found in Johannes Sartorius’s prov­ erb collection of 1561, while a variant, “To sing at the door of the deaf man” occurs in both the Kamper spreekwoorden and the Duytsche Adagia.76 However, a closer inspection shows that these are no ordinary beggars but mendicant monks, a conclusion borne out by the Flemish verses: “When I knock or beg, it is at a deaf man’s door. Our trying is in vain, our cowls are worn out. Alas, we have already eaten the best; thus I will

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figure 58: Jan Wierix, Begging at the Deaf Man’s Door. Engraving. From the Twelve Proverbs. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. © Rijksmuseum-Stichting Amsterdam.

soon abandon the beggar’s sack.” This is a rather curious commentary: it condemns not so much the uncharitable man deaf to the mendicants’ pleas as it does the mendicants themselves who apparently meet with so little response that they are ready to abandon begging for a more profitable enterprise. The mendicants had long been criticized, especially by the hardwork­ ing urban middle classes: an Antwerp referein of the period, for example, describes the mendicants as “a crowd of fellows who live by the begging bowl and don’t pay excise or tribute.”77 Erasmus frequently voiced his dislike of Franciscans and other mendicants. In his Praise of Folly, Dame

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Folly speaks of the monks who “stand at the door bawling out their demands for bread (indeed there is no inn or coach or ship where they do not make a disturbance), depriving other beggars of no small share of their income.” In his colloquy “The Well-to-do Beggars,” a Franciscan monk objects to the lack of free hospitality at the inn, to which the innkeeper replies, “You sing to the deaf.”78 Rabelais expresses a comparable sentiment in his Pantagruel, when Panurge embarks on an impassioned if tongue-incheek defense of “those good mendicant Friars and the Dominicans, who constitute the two hemispheres of Christen­dom,” and who, like monks in general, Panurge assures us elsewhere, “metic­u lously follow that mo­ nastic saying, De missa ad mensam (From Mass to meal).”79 While antipathy toward the mendicants was traditional, the ambiguous verses on Wierix’s print may express a specifically Protestant attitude. This is all the more likely because Jan Wierix and his family seem to have been active Lutherans, designing a number of prints in collaboration with the Lutheran factor of the Violieren chamber, Willem van Haecht. 80 As one of Van Haecht’s relatives, the Antwerp tafereel maker (panel maker) Godevaert van Haecht noted in his journal, among the other mendicant orders, the Franciscans were especially feared and hated for their zealous persecution of the Protestants.81 In a Protestant referein composed probably sometime before 1558, the news of the death of “Matthijs de Fluijter” (Martin Luther) is received by two Franciscan monks with considerable jubilation.82 It was only after the fall of Ant­werp to Spanish troops in 1585 that the Wierix family converted to Catholicism.83 All this suggests that the Twelve Proverbs most likely originated sometime before this date. Indeed, it may be significant that Begging at the Deaf Man’s Door, to my knowledge, is the only plate in the series that exists in a second state. All the original verses were erased, to be replaced by Flemish verses only, and these not only omit the references to mendicants present in the first state but totally obliterate the sense of the original proverb: “Friends be sober, but make good cheer. It seems sour to me to make the rounds begging. If there is no wine, there should be good beer, and that is some­

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thing that is also good for the health.”84 Perhaps the inscription was changed for a second edition of the Twelve Proverbs published after 1585, but, like so much concerning this series, this suggestions must remain in the realm of speculation.

iii As we have seen, the verses appended to the Twelve Proverbs not only identify the proverbs represented but employ these images as the starting point of an extended if sometimes obscure moralizing commentary. In this mutual interdependence of image and text, the Twelve Proverbs have much in common with the contemporary emblem. Well defined by a mod­ ern scholar as “a moralizing art that relies on pictures,”85 the emblem con­ sists of three parts: a prefatory motto, often cryptic in meaning; an often equally enigmatic image (called a devise, or device); and an explanatory poem.86 Originating in the earlier sixteenth century, emblems and emblem books enjoyed several centuries of tremendous popularity. A good example of an emblem can be seen in one of the earliest English emblem books, Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes, a compendium of earlier em­ blems that was published at Leiden in 1586 (Fig. 59). In this instance, the devise depicts a strawberry plant entwined by a serpent; above it is the motto Latet anguis in herba (A chill snake lurks in the grass). Taken from Virgil’s Third Eclogue, it is a phrase that seems to have been the origin of the proverbial “snake in the grass,” referring, as we learn from the poem below, to someone who conceals his enmity for another under a mask of friendship. 87 A number of emblem books were published at Antwerp, and foreign emblem books circulated widely in the Netherlands. 88 As might be expected, the rederijkers exploited this newly fashionable genre in their own productions. Indeed, as J. J. M. Vandommele has shown, the poëtij­ ckelijke puncten (poetical pageants) displayed by the participating chambers at the Antwerp Landjuweel of 1561 show striking affinities with the emblem tradition in their combination of word and image.89 Thus, as an artist in

figure 59: Laetet Anguis in Herba. From Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (Leiden: Christopher Plantin, 1586). Williamstown, Massachusetts, Chapin Library of Rare Books, Williams College.

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Ant­werp associated with Willem van Haecht and presumably other rede­ rijkers as well as with the Antwerp artists’ guild, Wierix would undoubtedly have been familiar with emblems and emblem books. To be sure, the correspondence between emblems and Wierix’s suite of proverb prints is not complete, for the short French couplets accompanying seven of the Twelve Proverbs are not strictly comparable to the emblematic mottos. Nevertheless, the emblem writers of the period were well aware of the close connection between emblems and proverbs. Erasmus’s Adagia provides an intriguing prototype; its proverbs, laconic in structure and often obscure in meaning, followed by a commentary, need only visual images to function as an emblem book in prose.90 Symptomatic of this relation between proverb and emblem is the friendship between Erasmus and the Italian jurist Andrea Alciati, who produced the first emblem book, Emblematum Liber, issued in 1531 (with the illustrations added by the publisher), followed by several augmented editions in the author’s lifetime.91 Although they never met in person, the two men exchanged letters and sent messages through their mutual friend the Basel publisher Boniface Amerbach.92 Erasmus also refers to “my friend Alciati” in the Adages.93 For his part, to the 1546 edition of his emblem book, Alciati added the emblem “The Twelve Labors of Hercules,” which one scholar has seen as an epitaph for Erasmus, who had died ten years before.94 Alciati was inspired, it seems, by a proverb in the Adages, Herculei labores, to which Erasmus attached a long commentary justifying his own scholarly labors.95 Alciati borrowed further emblems from Erasmus’s Adagia and other proverb collections,96 as did other emblem writers,97 and at least one of them explicitly acknowledged doing so. Gilles Corrozet’s Hecatomgraphie (Paris, 1540), carries a subtitle informing readers that he had drawn his emblems from sententious sayings, apothegms, proverbs, and the like.98 In the introduction that Marcus Antonius Gillis van Diest appended to his Netherlandish translation, published at Antwerp in 1566, of Johannes Sambucus’s Emblemata, he explains that emblems can be derived from many sources, including the gemeyn spreecwoort, or common proverb.99 A number of the mottos accompanying the emblems in the Netherlandish

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edition of Sambucus have a homely proverbial ring, such as “Fortune favors the brave,” “Pride goes before a fall,” and “Time cures all ills,” as well as such expressions as “not to see beyond one’s nose.”100 Geoffrey Whitney also turned to proverbial material, not only the line from Virgil (see Fig. 59) but also the phrase “all flesh is grass,” from Isaiah 40:6,101 as well as the well-known phrase Festina lente (make haste slowly), to which Erasmus had devoted a long commentary in his Adages.102 The use of proverbs and proverbial expressions, especially for the mottos, reached its height in the emblem books of Jacob Cats and other Dutch writers of the seventeenth century.103

iv The emblematic qualities of the Twelve Proverbs were lost in the numerous paintings that they inspired, although the copies usually preserved the circular format of the original prints. The Misanthrope and Kaakspeler, for example, were copied sometime in the last third of the sixteenth century on the reverse of two painted wooden plates originally made about 1550.104 Many others were painted by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, and still others are attributed to him or his followers.105 The most popular subject, it seems, was The Misanthrope, which has survived in six copies, including a painting by Pieter the Younger, dated 1599, which places the figures in a different setting; three copies each are known of Man Warming Himself at a Neighbor’s Burning House, the Kaakspeler (one copy of the Kaakspeler reversing the composition), and Every Merchant Praises His Own Wares. Also copied, although in smaller numbers, were the Drunken Fool Seated on the Egg, The Blind Leading the Blind, and Man with Moneybags and Flatterers. We do not know, of course, why these particular subjects in the Twelve Proverbs commanded such popularity, while the others were apparently ignored. The most intriguing episode in the afterlife of the Twelve Proverbs was contributed by Johann Theodor de Bry, member of a family of print­ makers originally situated in Liège but who had fled the Netherlands to escape persecution as Lutherans and settled in Frankfurt. De Bry copied a number of the Twelve Proverbs as illustrations for the Emblemata Saecularia,

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which he and his brother Johann Israel first published in 1596, with a second edition issued at Oppenheim in 1611.106 The Emblemata Saecularia was an emblem collection that could be used as a Stammbuch (a genealogical book), a name that came to be applied to a type of album amicorum, or friendship album, to which friends of the owner contributed their coats of arms, personal mottos, poems, and often drawings.107 Perhaps best known is the volume assembled by Abraham Ortelius, published in facsimile in 1969, to which his friends and colleagues added drawings and texts, often of an emblematic nature.108 People occasionally had books bound with blank pages inserted between the printed folios to create friendship volumes; most often employed for this purpose were emblem books.109 It is understandable that enterprising publishers soon issued books designed specifically as friendship albums, with appropriate texts and often with illustrations. The earliest volume of this type is the Thesaurus Amicorum, a “treasury of friends” published by Jean de Tournes at Lyon in 1558; the first German friendship album was issued at Frankfurt in 1574.110 De Bry’s Emblemata Saecularia thus capitalized on this double vogue for emblem books and illustrated friendship albums, although he broke up the traditional format of the emblem to accommodate them to their new function. The explanatory verses, always in Latin and German, oc­ casionally also in French and Netherlandish, were published separately near the beginning of the volume, each text keyed by number to the mottos and images that followed. The images in turn were interspersed with blank escutcheons in which album contributors could inscribe their own coats of arms (Fig. 60).111 The volume begins with a table of contents identifying each emblem in a rhyming couplet. Although small in size, what we would call a pocket edition, Johann Theodor’s book featured fifty illustrations, of which few, if any, were de­ rived from actual emblems. Rather, they were assembled from a re­mark­ able hodgepodge of Flemish prints issued during the previous three or four decades, which Johann Theodor copied fairly closely, although he reduced the format and reversed the composition. They include designs

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figure 60: Page with blank escutcheon. Engraving. From Johann Theodor de Bry, Emblemata Saecularia (Frankfurt am Main, 1596), opp. no. 11. Leiden University Library, Th. 1371.2.

after Maerten van Heemskerck and Marten de Vos, as well as after Pieter Bruegel himself, including the Elck. From Wierix’s Twelve Proverbs De Bry copied four prints for the first edition of the Em­blemata Saecularia; four more appear in the enlarged edition of 1611 (see Figs. 61, 62), in which the total number of emblems was increased to seventy-two.112 For the four proverb images adapted from Wierix in the 1596 edition, De Bry copied the Netherlandish verses from the original prints as well

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figure 61: Every Merchant Praises His Own Wares. Engraving. From Johann Theodor de Bry, Emblemata Saecularia (Oppenheim, 1611), no. 13. Cologne, Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek.

as the French inscriptions where they exist, augmenting them with verses in Latin and German. For the new illustrations after Wierix in the 1611 edition, however, he omitted the original verses completely in favor of the new Latin and German verses; it is generally assumed that the new verses were composed by someone other than De Bry, but they generally pre­ serve the meaning of the original inscriptions, sometimes preserving their obscurity, as in the Man with Moneybags and Flatterers. The reading of Archer Shooting All His Arrows proposed above is confirmed by the German verse for De Bry’s copy, titled Vergeblich Arbeit, or “Fruitless Labor.” In the

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figure 62: Knocking at the Deaf Man’s Door. Engraving. From Johann Theodor de Bry, Emblemata Saecularia (Oppenheim, 1611), no. 11. Cologne, Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek.

case of Each Merchant Praises His Own Wares (see Fig. 61), however, the Ger­ man verses indicate that both men are guilty of deceit in their dealings, whereas in Wierix’s print, only the peddler is the guilty one.113 In the Quarrelsome Housewife, the German poem expands on the plight of the husband by explaining that he will go out and drink wine until his wife again gives him a good word.114 The greatest change occurs in the image of the mendicants begging at the door of the deaf man (see Fig. 62). The Latin inscription on De Bry’s copy tells us: “We are monks and born to eat the fruits of the earth,” the last part of the verse echoing a passage from Horace, “we are but ciphers born to consume earth’s fruits,” cited by Erasmus several times in his Adages.115 This anticlerical sentiment is elaborated in the German verses:

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“We are called monks and nothing more. We create nothing and eat much. Who wants to live in idle days, he may give himself over to us. What others bring together with difficulty, we devour in dissipation.” It is possible that De Bry and his poet-collaborator were working from the second state of the original print, which omits any reference to the deaf man. And it is probably no accident that Knocking at the Deaf Man’s Door is followed im­ mediately by another emblem alluding to the unchaste lives supposedly led by nuns in their cloisters.116 In any case, living in Protestant Frankfurt, De Bry could openly give voice to extreme antimendicant sentiments that Wierix could express only in a veiled form some decades earlier in an Ant­werp still officially loyal to the Catholic Church. More important, De Bry’s transformation of the saying shows how proverb images could escape the confines of their original contexts and lead new lives of their own, adapted to new times and circumstances.

chapter five

the battle for the breeches A Proverb in the Making

., And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying: We will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel: only let us be called by thy name, take away our reproach. —isaiah 4:1

i In the early chapters of the book of Isaiah, the prophet warned Israel of the wars and other calamities that will befall her because she has forsaken the Lord, among them that many of her young men will be slain on the battlefield.1 As a result, as Isaiah explains, Israel’s young women will be driven to desperate measures to find husbands. The book of Isaiah played a major role in the development of Christian theology from the time of the early Church on, chiefly because so many of its verses were thought to prefigure the life and Passion of Christ as well as various Christian doctrines. In the preface to his Latin translation of Isaiah, St. Jerome had insisted that Isaiah “should be considered as an evangelist more than as a prophet . . . you would not think that he was foreseeing things to come, but narrating past events,”2 and, much later, Erasmus would refer to Isaiah in his Adages as the “inspired poet-prophet.”3 All this has been well explored in John F. A. Sawyer’s book The Fifth Gospel: Isaiah in the History of Christianity, published in 1996. 4 Isaiah 4:1, however, does not figure in Sawyer’s index of scriptural references, and I am not certain just

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how the medieval church would have construed this text in Christian terms.5 In the Byzantine Life of St. Andrew the Fool, composed in the eighth or ninth century, Andrew describes the events at the end of time, among them a great war in which many men will be killed; “now every woman will be a widow; seven women will seek one man and find him not,” a clear reference to Isaiah 4:1.6 In a German poem of the fourteenth cen­ tury, Isaiah’s seven women are made to symbolize the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the man for whom they struggle is none other than Jesus Christ,7 but this smacks less of cool theological discourse than of an overheated literary imagination. Two centuries later, the Flemish Cal­vin­ ist polemicist Philips van Marnix van St. Aldegonde cites the same verse, claiming that it is one of the biblical texts that the Catholic Church interprets to support its own doctrines and practices. Unhappily for our present purposes, however, he never tells us just how the Catholic Church expounded Isaiah’s verse, saying only that it should be understood literally. 8 However medieval theologians may have parsed Isaiah’s text, at some point in the later Middle Ages, his seven desperate women were taken literally, but in a quite unexpected fashion. Its precise nature can be seen in a fifteenth-century German carnival play, of which only a fragment survives. The male speaker struts about the stage, exulting that he has been born blessed, for he is being sought after by seven women, while the final verse of the play reminds us that this has come about just as the prophet had predicted.9 Isaiah’s verse would not have seemed so anom­ alous in Old Testament times, when polygamy was not uncommon,10 but in the Middle Ages, when monogamy had long been mandated by the Church, his seven women seeking one man must have appealed to at least some male readers as a titillating situation. Hence it is not difficult to understand why the author of the play has transformed Isaiah’s text into an erotic male fantasy, in which a number of women vie for the sexual favors of one man. What is undoubtedly another allusion to Isaiah 4:1 occurs in a roughly contemporary version of the old folk book Solomon and Marcolphus: to convince King Solomon that his praise of women is

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excessive, Marcolphus tricks the women of Jerusalem into believing that the king has just ordained that each man will have seven wives. Needless to say, the women storm the palace and angrily confront the king, asserting that it were far better that one woman had seven husbands rather than the reverse. This potentially violent encounter comes to an end only after Marcolphus has revealed his prank.11 Artists developed the clue of aggression in Isaiah’s statement—that the women of Israel “shall take hold of one man,” and perhaps identifying them with the daughters of Zion in Isaiah 3:16, whom the prophet describes as walking about “with stretched out necks, and wanton glances of their eyes”—and depicted seven women in violent contention, not for the man himself, however, but for his breeches.12 Beginning sometime after 1500 and continuing well into the nineteenth century, this subject occurs in prints and paintings, some of the most significant examples being produced in the Netherlands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This subject inspired by Isaiah’s verse must be distinguished from the marital struggle for the breeches, that is, the struggle of the husband and wife to see who will “wear the pants in the family,” a subject, as we have seen, that was especially pop­ ular from the later Middle Ages on. If I stress this point, it is because these two battles for the breeches—the husband and wife contending for mastery, and the seven women contending for the breeches—are some­ times lumped together, as do Andreas Pigler, in his indispensable Barok­ themen, and Lutz Rörich, in his Lexikon der sprichtwörtlichen Redensarten.13 In both cases, of course, the object of contention was until the past century or so an exclusively masculine article of clothing.14 Indeed, as an old Netherlandish proverb has it: “If she is nothing other than a girl, then she doesn’t need breeches.”15 Thus, in the marital battle of the breeches (see Fig. 56), the breeches symbolize the power and authority traditionally wielded by the husband in the family.16 How and when Isaiah 4:1 entered the visual arts is uncertain. In an article of 1905, Aby Warburg connected Isaiah’s verse with two fifteenth-

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figure 63: Master of the Banderoles, Struggle for the Breeches, ca. 1450. Engraving. © Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin–Preussischer Kulturbesitz. Photo: Jörg P. Anders. © Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.

century prints.17 What is most likely the earlier of the two is an engraving by the Master of the Banderoles, a German printmaker active in the second half of the century (Fig. 63),18 depicting a group of women who pummel each other for the article of clothing held aloft by several of the contenders. This is a pair of breeches, a male garment covering loins and thigh and to which stockings were attached.19 In the German print, the breeches function as a symbol of male potency; indeed, the fool stand­ ing to the right of the fray plays a bagpipe, whose phallic connotations we have already noted, while his companion on the left holds a baton that resembles a phallus. The print thus plays on the masculine fantasy that women crave the major contents of the breeches. Malcolm Jones makes this point very clearly when he illustrates a fifteenth-century Dutch lead

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figure 64: Peter Flötner, Mock Religious Procession, 1535. Woodcut. Nuremberg, Germanisches National Museum.

badge showing two women flanking a pair of breeches from which a giant phallus triumphantly emerges.20 In a fourteenth-century manuscript of the Roman de la Rose, several marginal scenes show a woman, possibly a nun, plucking phalli from a tree.21 Nuns, it seems, were especially the tar­ gets of such sexual innuendoes. Jones cites a woodcut of 1535 by the Ger­ man printmaker Peter Flötner (Fig. 64), an anti-Catholic satire showing a mock religious procession. At the left are two nuns, each bearing a long pitchfork from which flutters a pair of men’s breeches.22 Somewhat later, in the so-called Antwerp Songbook published in 1544, we find several songs in which a miller, a baker, a locksmith, or another artisan is approached by a female customer for his sexual favors. While these songs exploit the comic possibilities offered by the double entendres on various aspects of each man’s trade,23 they also exploit the common belief in woman’s sexual insatiability, a belief, incidentally, buttressed by the Bible itself. In the book of Proverbs (30:15–16), we read that there are four things that are never satisfied: “Hell, and the mouth of the womb, and the earth which is not satisfied with water: and the fire never saith: It is enough,” a claim repeated in Der Vrouwen natuer, a sixteenth-century Netherlandish folk book purportedly explaining the nature of women for its male readers.24 The composition of the Banderole Master’s print was reworked in the second example cited by Warburg, a Florentine engraving preserved in a unique impression in Munich (Fig. 65).25 For its survival we are indebted to Hartmann Schedel, famous as the publisher of the Nuremberg

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figure 65: Florentine School, Struggle for the Breeches, ca. 1450–60. Engraving. Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung. Photo: Engelbert Seehuber.

Weltchronik. Schedel pasted this print into a manuscript that he compiled while a student in Padua. Since Schedel completed the manuscript in 1464, we may assume that the print was executed that year or sometime earlier. Reversing the Banderole Master’s composition, the Italian engraver also softened the blatant sexual humor of his model. The contenders are now elegant young ladies and the prize is not so much the breeches themselves but a laurel wreath from which the breeches are suspended. Borne by two flying putti, the wreath encircles a bleeding heart pierced by an arrow. All this recalls the visual conventions of courtly love, as does the word “Amore” inscribed on the hem of the cloak worn by the maiden who has been thrown to the ground at lower left. The fool at the right holds, not a phallus, but a drum and fife. Moreover, the second fool in the Banderole Master’s print has been replaced by a figure of Death bearing a scythe, probably referring to the recurring need for human regeneration. The

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laurel wreath was an ancient symbol of victory, a circumstance that may have moved Schedel to inscribe at the top of the print the words “Vivequi vinci[s],” “live thou who conquerest.” Although Warburg’s identification of these prints has seldom been seriously challenged, 26 it is doubtful that these two engravings are actually indebted to Isaiah 4:1, especially since they both show twelve women rather than Isaiah’s seven. The battle of twelve women for the breeches may have a different origin entirely, perhaps in the sort of domestic decoration that appeared in the Middle Ages on objects of personal use, such as combs and boxes, and in more monumental form in murals and tapestries. 27 While the iconography of medieval domestic decoration has yet to be studied in depth, it was often of an erotic and satirical nature, treating subjects that later circulated in prints. 28 Two examples must suffice. One is the Fountain of Youth, 29 in which the rejuvenation of the men and women is immediately followed by their amorous horseplay, very much as it was depicted in another print by the Master of the Banderoles.30 The other is the so-called morris dance, featuring a woman, in German often designated Frau Venus, surrounded by her capering male admirers, a subject that with variations also appears in prints of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in northern Europe.31 In contrast to the Fountain of Youth and the morris dance, I know of only one other example of the twelve women locked in violent combat, in this case not for the breeches but for a large sausage, whose similarity in meaning to the breeches needs no comment. This occurs in a woodcut produced in Paris between 1560 and 1580; each contender for the prize is accompanied by a cartouche that was probably intended to be inscribed with her name, hence affording some clues to the subject, but the car­ touches, alas, remain blank.32 On the other hand, there are images of the struggle for the breeches by fewer than twelve women. In a Netherlandish misericord of about 1531–48, two women strive for the breeches held by a third.33 More complex is an engraving of about 1460–65 by the

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figure 66: Master E.S., Ornamental Foliage with the Struggle for the Breeches. Engraving. Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kupferstichkabinett.

Master E.S. depicting an intricate ornamental foliage inhabited by five nude women (Fig. 66): the woman at upper right prepares to don a pair of breeches contended for, it seems, by her companion reaching up from below, while to the left two women, one brandishing a winding frame (used in spinning), vie for a second pair. In contrast to the prints by the Master of the Banderoles and his Italian emulator, the struggle in this case is as playfully decorative as the foliage that contains it.34 Despite this paucity of evidence, it is tempting to speculate that the subject of women, of whatever number, contending for the breeches was a common late medieval pictorial theme that inspired the analogous depic­ tion of Isaiah 4:1.35 If so, this development would have likely oc­curred sometime before the two prints cited by Warburg: a small badge cast of a lead-tin amalgam, probably of Netherlandish origin and dated to the period 1375–1425 (Fig. 67),36 shows seven women standing beneath what

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figure 67: Seven Women beneath the Breeches, Netherlands, ca. 1375–1425. Lead badge. Cothen (The Netherlands), Van Beuningen Collection.

is very likely the remnants of an outsize pair of breeches. While the composition is considerably more static than later depictions, it appears the women’s attention is focused on the prize.

ii However this may be, the earliest sixteenth-century depiction of the seven women battling for the breeches can be found in an engraving by Frans Hogenberg, published by Bartholomeus de Mompere at Antwerp about 1558–60 (Fig. 68). Hogenberg specifically evokes the context of Isaiah’s prophesy in the battlefield visible in the left background, where women seek frantically for survivors amid the fallen soldiers. In the fore­ ground, seven women struggle violently for the possession of a pair of breeches, now knee-length with the stockings still attached.37 One woman

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figure 68: Frans Hogenberg, Struggle for the Breeches, ca. 1558–60. Engraving. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. © Rijksmuseum-Stichting Amsterdam.

attacks her opponent with her shoe, another wields a pair of shears, and a third swings her distaff. In the right background, the male symbol is abandoned for the man himself: here the ladies serve a youth at a banquet table and, in the picture-within-a-picture on the back wall, they bear gifts to the youth now enthroned, one woman placing a wreath on his head. It is not unlikely, as has been suggested, that the ornate gowns of the women represent another allusion to Isaiah 3:16, in which the haughty daughters of Zion wear fine apparel and a multitude of ornaments.38 This print, however bizarre it appears at first viewing, might seem to respond in a fairly serious fashion to Isaiah’s text, perhaps alluding to the casualties of a recent war. However, this is belied by the inscription at upper right, which is lighthearted, even risqué in tone.39 Roughly para­ phrased, it admonishes the men and boys, who in their breeches are quite handsomely turned out, to shake their buttocks. Seven women fight over one pair of breeches, we are told, because many men have been slain in the field. Thus the little women save the treasure in your breeches and wel­come it with much hospitality for marriage. The jollity that is in breeches-man is painless. The little ladies want to keep breeches-man,

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figure 69: Franz Brun, Struggle for the Breeches, 1560. Engraving. Strasbourg, Cabinet des Estampes et des Dessins de Strasbourg.

because he is the peacemaker of all women. 40 “Peacemaker,” peys maecker in the original text (elsewhere also spelled paysmaker), was a metaphor for the male organ of generation. A referein published in 1590, and probably in­tended to be recited at a wedding banquet, describes a bridal couple on the way to church by boat; the groom squats over the side of the boat to relieve himself, only to have his paysmaker bitten off by a fish. As a con­ sequence, he is abandoned by the bride, because, as we are told, “with­out a paysmaker, no man can maintain a home.” 41 We might agree with Erasmus’s objection that it is “a kind of blas­ phemy to twist Holy Writ into silly, profane jokes,”42 but this seems to have been a minority opinion in earlier centuries, at least in the case of Isaiah 4:1. Zeven quaey wijffs (seven bad women), for example, appeared in a public procession held at Herentals, in Brabant, about 1550; it is tempting to suppose that they were vying for the breeches. 43 More obvious and closer in spirit to Hogenberg’s print are verses in a mock New Year’s prognostication with the title Ulenspieghel, published at Antwerp in 1560. In a section of the poem labeled “Of Peace and War,” we are told that “It is two and thirty years ago, a little more or less, / That a war will take its

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figure 70: After Marten de Vos, Struggle for the Breeches. Engraving. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique.

beginning”—this is a mock prophesy, so presumably mixed-up tenses are allowable—“and on that occasion, so many knights and foot soldiers will be slain that seven women will fight for one pair of breeches.” Yes, the writer assures us, “I will protect my breeches carefully, in order to get a lot of women. How like knights they will drub each other! Then shall I get my breeches all rumpled in the crowd. Ha, ha, how they will be torn to pieces among the wives!”44 Hogenberg’s print has been dated near the time of this mock prophesy, about 1558–60,45 which is probably close to the mark: a partial copy of it, omitting the two background scenes at the right, was issued by the German engraver Franz Brun with the date 1560 (Fig. 69). 46 Thus, there may be connection between the print and the parody of 1560, but if so, its precise nature remains unclear. Probably dating from the last quarter of the sixteenth century is a print after a drawing by the Antwerp painter Marten de Vos (Fig. 70). 47 It may owe something to Hogenberg’s print (see Fig. 68), especially the

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form of the breeches and the choice of weapons, but De Vos’s design is simpler in composition, and, unlike their fancifully gowned sisters in Hogenberg’s version, the belligerent ladies are dressed in the height of current fashion, probably another allusion to the haughty daughters of Zion condemned in the third chapter of Isaiah. Two of the women pull at the stocking attached to a pair of breeches whose codpiece dominates the center of the struggle. 48 The French verses at lower left admonish this “amorous company” to treat the male member modestly, “for it is neither foot, head, shoulder or hand, For which you battle so strongly, But the germinating father of all the human race.” The Netherlandish verse might at first sight appear more discreet in sentiment: “There the women fight, and lack no badness. Each of the seven here is as the bravest. Pulling and tearing without style,” that is, in a vulgar fashion. The last line, however, reminds us: “Tis haer meer om tvoeijer dan om de broecken” (It is here more about the lining than about the breeches); the expression, het voeijer van de broeck (the lining of the breeches) is a humorous if oblique reference to the male organ. 49 At the left a robed man wearing a fool’s cap leaves the chamber but looks back over his shoulder at the fray; to him are probably to be attributed the words in the Latin inscrip­tion above: “Woe to you, Priapus, if your customary ‘stem’ is now concealed.”50 Priapus, the son of Venus by either Mercury, Adonis, or Bacchus—the ancient sources vary—was born with an oversize “stem,” or phallus, which made him the ideal deity to preside over the organs of generation,51 and in the print after De Vos, the Latin warning to Priapus, like the two verses in the vernacular, expresses the importance of continuing the human race. Priapus had long been associated with fertility in general: in antiquity crude images of the deity, usually in the form of a herm, were often placed in fields and gardens. But it was Priapus’s role in human sexuality that attracted the most attention, despite the fact that his own attempts to rape the nymph Lotis and the goddess Vesta, as we learn from Ovid, had been frustrated on each occasion by the braying of Silenus’s ass.52 In one of the verses in the Priapea, an ancient group of poems that enjoyed some notoriety during the Renaissance, when they were erro­

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neously attributed to Virgil,53 the poet blames his own sexual impotence on the “great phallic god” (Triphalle).54 Closest to the theme of our print is a passage from the Satires of Juvenal describing the secret rites of the Roman goddess of fertility, Bona Dea, in which the “maenads of Priapus,” their loins stirred by the sound of the pipe, whirl about and howl in sexual excitement.55 This minor and often-ridiculous god of the ancient pantheon was well known to the Renaissance: Erasmus, for example, refers to him as “Old Priapus” and as “that coarse and easy-going god,”56 and in the intro­duc­ tion to the Adages he offers “as lecherous as Priapus” as the sort of proverbial expression that can be effectively employed by speakers and writers.57 The sacrifice to Priapus was illustrated in two prints by the Italian artist Jacopo de’ Barbari;58 a third example appears in Francesco Colonna’s allegorical romance Hypnerotomacchia Poliphili, published in 1499, where an image of the god is shown “with all his decent and proper attributes.”59 And in Giovanni Bellini’s Feast of the Gods (Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art), Priapus steals upon the sleeping Lotis, this time his “proper attributes” discreetly concealed by his tunic.60 More than a playful display of antiquarian wit, however, the Latin verses inscribed on the print after Marten de Vos of the seven struggling ladies may also allude to a badly eroded sculptural relief still visible today in its original position on the wall above the entrance to Het Steen (Fig. 71), part of the Castle of Antwerp and long used as a prison. When the relief was placed there is not known, but by the fifteenth century, it was believed to be of Roman origin, and sometime before the mid-sixteenth century it became identified as the god Priapus.61 This is testified to, for example, by Juan Christóbal Calvete de Estrella, a Spanish historian in the entourage of Prince Philip of Spain, later Philip II, on his visit to the Netherlands in 1549. In his account of the prince’s tour, Calvete described the relief as “easy to recognize as a Priapus.”62 It was similarly identified by Lodovico Guicciardini in his description of the Netherlands first published in 1567,63 and by Joannes Goropius Becanus, whose singular views on the antiquity of his native language we have already encountered.64 Becanus tells us

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figure 71: Priapus. Sculptural relief above the entrance to Het Steen, Antwerp. Photo: author.

further that women often appealed to this figure, especially, as we are informed by a later writer, for his help against infertility.65 The Antwerp “Priapus” thus joins the phallic saints and pseudo-saints endowed with similar fecundating powers in the later Middle Ages.66 This readiness to identify the relief on Het Steen as a phallic deity may perhaps have been encouraged by the presence in Antwerp of a Christian relic, the foreskin of the Infant Christ. This suggestion is not as far-fetched as it might seem. Guicciardini tells us that this relic had been sent as a gift to Antwerp in 1101 by Godefroid de Bouillon, king of Jerusalem;67 when Becanus repeated this account in his treatise of 1569, he added that Godefroid had sent the Holy Foreskin to Antwerp specifically to counter the cult of Priapus there.68 In the time of Guicciardini and Becanus, the relic was preserved in the Cathedral of Our Lady, in a chapel maintained by the prestigious Confraternity of the Circumcision. 69 Although any connections between Priapus and the Sacred Prepuce must remain conjectural, what is perhaps a third reference in this period to the

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relief on Het Steen, more oblique and so hitherto unnoticed, occurs in another mock New Year’s prognostication, this one published at Antwerp in 1561, in which readers are informed that “Venus will be in the environs of the house of Priapus, and Mars will have no domination,” a planetary conjunction favoring love, not war.70 Just when the Antwerp “Priapus” lost his most salient feature is un­ certain. Calvete had found the subject of the sculpture “easy to recognize,” but later writers observe that its phallus had been effaced. Becanus attributes this to certain “superstitious practices,” while in his Itinerarium Galliae of 1630, Judocus Sincerus claimed that many women swallowed the powder scraped from the image as a cure for sterility.71 Other writers, however, state that the relief had been deliberately defaced, and although their accounts differ in various details, this event seems to have occurred shortly after Antwerp surrendered in 1585 to the duke of Parma and his Spanish forces. The newly returned Jesuits installed a statue of the Madonna and Child in a niche above the entrance to Het Steen, appar­ently at the same time mutilating the “Priapus” relief just beneath.72 This act of pious vandalism may well have inspired the print after De Vos, in which case, its priapic inscription could well have been a joking allusion to the Jesuits’ desecration of what seems to have been a venerable civic monument.

iii Whatever the case, there is no doubt that Isaiah 4:1 enjoyed consider­able popularity in the Netherlands, where, before the end of the sixteenth cen­ tury, the seven battling ladies had, in fact, become proverbial. While Frans Hogenberg had not included them in his Blau Huicke print of about 1558 (see Fig. 14), they were added to the various prints inspired by Hogenberg’s composition, including one dated 1577 by Joannes van Doe­tecum,73 and another issued after 1633 by Johannes Galle (Fig. 72), as well as other copies issued well into the eighteenth century.74 In each instance, the seven women struggle for the breeches in a little clearing in the right back­ ground and are generally identified simply with the phrase “Here fight the seven women for one man’s breeches,” or a variant thereof.75 Final

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figure 72: Johannes Galle, publisher, Die Blau Huicke, after 1633. Engraving, 2nd state. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. © Rijksmuseum-Stichting Amsterdam.

proof, if any is needed, that Isaiah’s seven scandalous women had achieved a proverbial status appears in a series of Dutch proverb etchings first issued sometime during the seventeenth century. Among such venerable expressions as “much squeal and little wool,” “casting roses before swine,” and “butting one’s head against the wall,” the Battle for the Breeches finds an honorable place (Fig. 73), bearing the inscription “Het is al om den Broeck” (It is all about the breeches).76 Al­t hough this saying cannot be found in any of the proverb collections known to me, it is comparable to another expression, “one of the seven women who tied the devil to a pillow,”77 which designated any ill-tempered woman; Bruegel included her in both Netherlandish Proverbs and Dulle Griet.78 Perhaps in the verbalized form of “One of the seven women who battled for the breeches,” the Battle for the Breeches commonly characterized any unmarried woman who pursued members of the opposite sex in an unseemly manner, but this must remain speculation.

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figure 73: Battle for the Breeches, Dutch, 17th century. Etching. Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum.

The artist who cornered the market on the Battle for the Breeches was none other than Adriaen van de Venne, who seems to have specialized in subjects that had been popular in the previous century, including, as we have seen, the hay and turnip allegories. To Isaiah’s man-hungry women Van de Venne devoted several designs for prints, as well as an illustration for one of his books.79 In one of the prints after his drawings or perhaps after the painting at Vassar College to be discussed below (see Fig. 75),80 seven fashionably dressed ladies struggle for the breeches; the latter ar­ ticle belongs most likely to the man pointing at the melee from the right, his bare shanks visible below his long shirttails. The image seems tonguein-cheek, although the verses inscribed beneath the image, pos­sibly by a writer other than Van de Venne, follow Isaiah’s original meaning fairly closely. We are told that God’s hand will strike the land with such severity that in every village few able-bodied men will survive the fire, and thus—and I paraphrase—“seven women will lust after one man as their head and lord, so that from his lineage [ geschlacht] might flow again their salvation and honor, and remove their scorn.”81 Not only young women of marriageable age strive for the breeches but frustrated old maids as well. Van de Venne developed this idea at great length in his Tafereel van de belachende Werelt, or Tableau of the Laughable World, a long poem satirizing human foibles, published at The Hague in 1635. The volume contains a number of etched illustrations, among them the Battle for the Breeches (Fig. 74). 82 The man appears this time at the left, his long shirt barely covering his naked loins; he tears at his hair in

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figure 74: Battle for the Breeches. Etching. From Adriaen van de Venne, Tafereel van de belachende Werelt (The Hague, 1635). Photo courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard College Library, Neth 5234.31*.

dismay as he watches his fine pair of breeches about to be rent asunder by the battling women. The Laughable World consists of a series of humorous conversations among people attending a Dutch carnival. This particular illustration comes in the midst of a long dialogue between two peasants, a woman named Soetje Strijckers and her suitor, Lammert Gijsen. Soetje, literally “Sweetie,” continually rejects Lammert’s overtures, for she has taken a fancy to Vrome Koen, the son of a Delft brewer. Lammert reminds her that women who are too particular in their choice of suitors may end up as spinsters, and then they will be like the seven women shown in pic­ tures, who, in his words, “driven wild, fought for an empty pair of breeches.” “Fye,” retorts Soetje, it is a lie; it would be scandalous for the skirt to fight for the breeches. Lammert counters by describing just such a fight: the women pounded away at each other, one wielding her distaff, another her slipper, just as they do in our illustration, and, for that matter, in

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Hogenberg’s print (see Fig. 68). “Is it not sweet,” Lammert concludes rather smugly, “that so many [women] nowadays hold men’s clothing so dear?” Soetje snorts at this: yes, artists often paint pictures showing “six or seven silly maidens, man-crazy and silly and frisky, trashy and insatiable, wild and careless!” But Lammert insists that older women as well as young maidens want the breeches and warns Soetje that there are spinsters who would certainly fight for them; that is, if Soetje does not want him, there are many others who will. 83 After further adventures with Lammert and his companions, Soetje rejects Lammert one last time to pursue the brewer’s son. The latter promises much but ultimately abandons Soetje, leaving her bewailing her fate as she turns away from the gates of Delft to make her way home. 84 When Soetje asserts that there are paintings showing “six or seven silly maidens” scrambling for the breeches, she knows whereof she speaks, for two paintings of this subject have come down to us from Adriaen van de Venne. One of them closely repeats in reverse the illustration in Tableau of the Laughable World, although in the painting the man has been relegated to the right background. 85 As to which composition came first, we do not know. The other painting, now at Vassar College (Fig. 75), may well have inspired the print discussed above, for it shows much the same com­po­ sition in reverse; the women range considerably in age, bearing out Lam­ mert’s contention that even older spinsters will join the fray. 86 Here, the man looks out at us as he gestures toward the battling women, his naked thigh partially concealed by a flowing shirt, in contrast to the woman at the far right whose exertions expose her naked rump to public view. In the two sixteenth-century depictions of the Battle for the Breeches, the real object of contention is seldom present; even in Hogenberg’s print (see Fig. 68), the cosseted youth is considerably removed from the fight. Van de Venne decisively broke with this tradition by showing the man himself witnessing the struggle for his breeches, but it is uncertain if this represents his own invention. A comparable example occurs in the anonymous Dutch etching mentioned above (see Fig. 73): in this case, in the left middle distance, a man without his pants, his manly parts

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figure 75: Adriaen van de Venne, Battle for the Breeches. Oil on panel, 211⁄2 x 31 in. The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York. Purchase, Friends of the Vassar Art Gallery Fund, 1985.21.

exposed, stands with the fierce struggle behind him. A painting attributed to Pieter Brueghel the Younger shows an unusual variant of this subject (Fig. 76). 87 Seated in the left foreground, a man watches with some con­ sternation as four women struggle violently for the pair of breeches dan­ gling from the tree above them; in the right middle ground the same man, still minus his breeches, kneels before another group of four women or perhaps the same ones, who this time caress him. The temporal se­ quence of the two scenes is unclear, as is the precise meaning of the subject, all the more so as there are eight contenders for the breeches, instead of the usual seven.

iv The latest Netherlandish depictions of Isaiah 4:1 that I have encountered so far occur in the eighteenth century, one in a print in the tradition of Hogenberg’s Blau Huicke,88 the other in a woodcut published at Ghent. 89

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figure 76: Attributed to Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Battle for the Breeches. Painting. Location unknown. Photo: RKD, The Hague.

As Sigrid Metken has shown, the erotic and satirical possibilities of Isaiah 4:1 were exploited for centuries elsewhere in Europe.90 A prime example appears in a print by the expatriate Netherlander Johann Theodor de Bry, who, we will remember, had sought refuge from religious persecution in Frankfurt. Published at Cologne in 1595,91 it was repeated by De Bry a few years later in a reduced version with minor changes in his Emblemata Saecularia (Fig. 77).92 In both images, massed troops appear in the left distance, an allusion to Isaiah 3, while in the right foreground are the usual seven brawling women. A new element is introduced by the foppish gentleman at the left who examines a miniature woman that he holds in a sieve. In the verses accompanying the print and book illus­ tration, the fop explains that war has decreased the number of available men but the number of women keeps increasing, so now he can choose any maiden he wants, and that is why he sifts them, searching for the most

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figure 77: Battle for the Breeches. Engraving. From Johann Theodor de Bry, Emblemata Saecularia (Oppenheim, 1611), no. 42. Cologne, Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek.

desirable one. Indeed, just below the sieve, a rejected candidate tumbles to the ground. For the man, as we would say, it is a buyer’s market.93 A German print of about 1630 adds a further twist to the treatment that Van de Venne gave Isaiah 4:1 in his Tableau of the Laughable World. Ac­ cording to the text on the print, the seven struggling women shown in the print exemplify ill-tempered wives who have lost their husbands; shunned by other men because of their shrewish nature, they become so desperate that they struggle for the breeches as a poor substitute.94 Mal­

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colm Jones has discovered an English print published in 1680 with a particularly blatant inscription that makes our Netherlandish examples seem decorous.95 The subject seems to have enjoyed especial favor in Scandinavia and eastern Europe, where it was used to decorate boxes, the face boards of beehives, and other objects of domestic use down to the end of the nineteenth century. In this final incarnation, the struggling women are often fewer than the canonical seven, and their struggles sometimes undergo strange transformations. In one case, a young fisherman dangles his breeches as bait over a pond containing three young women; in another instance, four women cook Hosensuppe (breeches soup), as Metken calls it, laboring over a cauldron containing three pairs of breeches.96 It is evident that by this time the Battle for the Breeches had completely slipped its moorings in Isaiah 4:1 and had evolved into an independent folk motif. Social historians may be best equipped to explain the longevity of this theme in its various guises, but I venture to suggest that while the women of each generation may have responded to the Battle for the Breeches much like Adriaen van de Venne’s Soetje (“silly maidens, man-crazy and silly and frisky, trashy and insatiable, wild and careless!”), many of their menfolk, especially the younger ones, would not have objected had this part of Isaiah’s prophesy come to pass in their own time.

conclusion Figures of Fun and Folly

., Not all fools wear bells. —stijevoort, refereinenbundel, 1524

Without our fools here, who would entertain the people? —job van der wael, ca. 1619

i In 1516, the year of Hieronymus Bosch’s death, Desiderius Erasmus helped supervise the publication of a little book by his friend Thomas More. This was the Utopia, the second part of which describes in detail a myth­ ical island lying somewhere south of the equator and inhabited by a wellordered society that More endowed with many of the virtues he saw conspicuously lacking in the Europe of his time.1 Only a few details can be given here. The Utopians are governed, not by a king ambitious to increase his power, revenues, and territories, but by a benevolent magistracy concerned exclusively with the welfare of its people. No one is rich, no one is poor. The citizens all engage in useful labor; goods are distributed equally. Justice is administered equitably without regard to rank or wealth, arrogance is unknown among the governing classes, and no one seeks his or her own advantage at the expense of others. There is no ostentation of dress: everyone wears simple but long-lasting garments of leather and undyed woolen cloaks. Perhaps most marvelous of all, Utopians scorn gold and silver as base metals: their chamber pots are made of gold, and their common criminals are forced to wear gold finger rings, earrings, and headbands, presumably as a mark of shame. As for

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pearls and precious gems, these the Utopians give as baubles to their children who, of course, discard such playthings as they grow up.2 How many of More’s contemporaries must have viewed his Utopia is well summed up about a generation after its first edition by Anton Francesco Doni in his introduction to an Italian translation of More’s work: “you will find in this republic . . . the best customs, good orders, wise regulations, holy teachings, sincere government, and regal men; the cities are well established, as are the offices, justice, and mercy.”3 Among other things, the Utopians “ban absolutely all lawyers as clever practi­ tioners and sly interpreters of the law,”4 thereby anticipating by almost ninety years a more radical proposal for another fictional com­monwealth: “The first thing we do let’s kill all the lawyers” (Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Second Part, act 4, scene 2, line 78). Although More does not tell us, we may plausibly suppose that these sane and sensible people also disdain the rhetorical arts of the lawyer, the orator, the preacher—a disdain that en­ compasses proverbs as well. They must prize these gems of discourse as little they do real gems. Their language is probably as plain as their cloth­ ing, and we may assume that they hardly need the authority of proverbs to persuade them to virtuous action; knowing the right thing to do, they simply do it. Had Bosch’s Haywain triptych been exhibited in Utopia, its citizens might well have been puzzled by the artist’s belaboring such an obvious and generally accepted truth. In our own imperfect world, however, proverbs continue to prepackage nuggets of wisdom that remind us of the many ways we can be blinded by the Blue Cloak even as they enchant us with their colorful formulations. This is why proverbs have survived the strictures of Philip Dormer Stan­ hope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, who in the eighteenth century counseled his son against using “old sayings, and common proverbs; which are so many proofs of having kept bad or low company.”5 (In the next century, this advice would be echoed in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, in which the socially ambitious Clare Gibson admonishes her stepdaughter that “proverbs and idioms are never used by people of edu­cation.” 6 ) In a similar vein, Chesterton’s contemporary Jonathan Swift published A

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Complete Collection of Polite and Ingenious Conversation, a witty satire featuring a company of fashionable people whose conversation consists mainly of the shopworn proverbs and proverbial expressions.7 Later pundits, too, have repeatedly condemned proverbs as hackneyed, misleading, and even inimical to discursive thought. 8 But even if nowadays, in our striving for originality of expression, proverbs do not occupy a privileged place in written discourse,9 they still lead a vigorous life in the spoken word; as Wolfgang Mieder and his colleagues have abundantly shown, new proverbs emerge all the time, as well as variations of the old.10 Similarly, taking proverbs literally hardly ended with the Nether­ landish rederijkers or with artists like Adriaen van de Venne. Proverb images proliferated in the Dutch Republic, including woodcuts showing a series of proverbs on a single sheet, each within its own frame.11 The Leiden painter Jan Steen produced a number of proverb paintings, of which a favorite was “As the old sang, so pipe the young” (meaning that children will imitate their elders), while in the Spanish Netherlands, Jacob Jordaens produced proverb subjects in paintings and tapestry cartoons. In the eighteenth century, the proverb “The pitcher goes so often to the well that it breaks” was frequently depicted.12 Emblem books also long continued to illustrate proverbs, and the so-called proverbe dramatique, a short dramatic sketch acting out a proverb, provided enter­ tainment in French salons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.13 Nowadays proverbs and proverbial expressions are a staple source of humor in our comic strips, and the New Yorker regularly advertises umbrellas inspired by George Booth, one of its leading car­toonists, and decorated, as one might expect, with his well-known cats and dogs. Our editorial cartoonists, moreover, exploit the traditional power of proverbs to make trenchant comments on current affairs, but with a significant difference. While earlier proverb pictures commented in generalized terms on the human condition, modern political cartoons more often skewer particular persons, corporations, and events: politi­cians routinely paint themselves into corners or tilt at windmills (bor­rowing a proverb from Cervantes’s

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Don Quixote), for example, and in infinite permutations, the big fish of banking and industry ruthlessly pursue the smaller ones.14 In 1975 the American artist Thom Breiten­bach, inspired by Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs, painted his Proverbidioms, a modern American landscape containing, by some counts, more than 500 hundred proverbs and proverbial expressions, exceeding by far the mere 202 or so depicted in the proverb picture by a follower of Sebastian Vrancx (see Fig. 35). Breitenbach’s pic­ ture was an immediate success, and its wide and continuous reproduction in posters and on T-shirts demonstrates that such proverbes en action have not lost their appeal in the modern age.15 Nevertheless, while proverb images have had a long life from the later Middle Ages on, the depiction of proverbs attained its first and perhaps most brilliant flowering during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a phenomenon perhaps due to the immense success of Erasmus’s Adages and the many volumes of vernacular proverbs it inspired. Sigrid Metken’s account of the later fortunes of the Battle for the Breeches suggests that further study would yield a rich harvest of proverb prints and paintings produced elsewhere in Europe.16 However that may be, Netherlandish artists seem to have been especially active in exploring the possibilities offered by the pictured proverb. The precise reasons for this fascination with such “speaking deeds” are still unclear, but it may owe much to a fortuitous conjunction of circumstances: the “linguistic nationalism” of the period, which seems to have been particularly acute in the Low Countries, coupled with the emergence of Antwerp as a center of art production catering to an international market. The products of the Antwerp painters were exported all over Europe,17 and the engravings and etchings issued by Hieronymus Cock and his colleagues often bore inscriptions in several languages, including Latin, ensuring that their subject matter, proverbial or otherwise, would be understood abroad.18 For example, through the efforts of Antwerp’s printmakers and publishers, even the message of Bosch’s Haywain enjoyed an afterlife never dreamed of by its creator.

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In this proliferation of proverb images, artists devised their images in a number of ways. A single proverb could be depicted by itself, a presentation as straightforward as an entry in a published proverb collection of the period, such as we see in the picture depicting “He who would get through the world must bend” (see Fig. 11). A proverb could also be developed into a visually complex image that examines at length its various aspects, sometimes by means of one or more related proverbs; a well-known example, of course, is Bruegel’s Elck. Conversely, a group of proverbs could be passed in review, as it were, within a single framework, often a landscape, either related in theme, as in the anonymous Proverbs on Sloth (see Fig. 79), or thematically unrelated in all but their proverbial status, such as in the early-sixteenth-century Netherlandish tapestry fragment (see Fig. 9) and Hogenberg’s Blau Huicke print. Ranging as they did from figures of fun to figures of folly, these pictured proverbs could be lighthearted and frivolous, inspired by little more than the desire to exploit that tension so often existing between what a proverb says and what it actually means. Or they could convey a serious message, as fraught with exhortations and admonishments as any Franciscan sermon.19

ii Bosch’s Haywain, of course, represents a prime example of this latter category. Taking as his text, so to speak, a single homely proverb, the artist shows how the goods and honors of this world are merely “Al hoy.” Very much as medieval preachers employed analogies and anecdotes drawn from the everyday experience of their congregations, the artist drives home his lesson with specific personifications of greed, ambition, and deceit, encompassing the great prelates of this world no less than the simple monks, peasants, Gypsies, and other members of the lower social orders. Much like a Lenten sermon, Bosch’s message is simple but stark: humanity’s neglect of true spiritual goods in the pursuit of the specious goods of this world constitutes not merely folly but a mortal sin in the sight of God, who will not fail to punish it in the next world by everlasting

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pain. Bosch thus elaborated the baldly stated phrase “Al hoy” into an allegory of universal proportions, situating it within the great sweep of sacred history. In contrast to the fairly numerous copies and close variants that have survived of other paintings by Bosch, such as his Adoration of the Magi, Gar­ den of Earthly Delights, or Operation for the Stone of Folly,20 only a single copy of the Haywain triptych has come down to us, done about 1550. However, the central composition of the Haywain was reworked sometime before 1542 in a tapestry cartoon that originally formed one of a five-part series of “the devices of Hieronymus,” from which, in turn, were woven at least three sets of tapestries, of which one set of four survives as part of the Spanish national patrimony. It was through this considerably revised tapestry version that Bosch’s composition was to inspire a number of later hay allegories, including Frans Hogenberg’s Al Hoy print and two paintings by Gillis Mostaert and his circle. Bosch’s original composition must have been still accessible in some form, for it seems to have been known to Remigius Hogenberg when he created the most remarkable metamorphosis of the hay allegory, his Turnip Wagon etching of the 1560s, although its lighthearted verses are hardly in the spirit of its model. Some years, later, about 1583, Frans Hogenberg’s Al Hoy was reworked and ex­ panded in a print by Joannes van Doetecum, who provided it with German inscriptions.21 If to this we add the compositions apparently owing little if anything to Bosch, such as the drawings by Adriaen Pietersz Crabeth and Frans Pourbus the Elder, and above all the grisaille paintings by Adriaen van de Venne, who in the seventeenth century also treated its alter ego, the turnip wagon, it is evident that the proverb Al hoy possessed a particular resonance for a society that defined its besetting sins as selfishness and avarice. A long succession of religious and civil conflicts, as well as frequent economic disruptions, ensured that the message of the hay and turnip wagons would continue to be relevant long after Bosch’s Haywain triptych had passed from memory. In turning to the Twelve Proverbs engraved by Jan Wierix (and possibly a colleague) sometime before 1585, we encounter a quite different series

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of images. Unlike Bosch’s Haywain and its successors, they show us sinful humanity not en masse but in separate episodes of folly, with no threat of divine retribution. While this series repeats four proverbs depicted by Bruegel and generally recalls the style of his later paintings, such as The Mis­anthrope and The Peasant and the Nest Robber, it is unlikely that these prints, except for The Misanthrope, reflect his authentic compositions. Moreover, their moral lessons tend to be blunted by the complexity of their imagery and the occasionally tenuous relation between their subject matter and the accompanying verses. However, this characteristic brings them close to the emblem books of the period, whose contents were often inspired by proverbs. Like emblems, the Twelve Proverbs combine image with ex­ planatory text, lacking only the mottos that invariably accompanied the emblem. Moreover, like the emblem books, the Twelve Proverbs would have been appreciated by viewers of the period, I suspect, less for their possibilities of moral improvement than for their ingenuity. If the Twelve Proverbs are obscure in many respects, even more so is the subject of our last group of proverb images, the seven ladies who struggle so valiantly and often so violently for a pair of man’s breeches. If Erasmus’s Adages and its successors tend to stretch the modern definition of the proverb to the breaking point, surely the brazen contenders inspired by Isaiah 4:1 tear it completely asunder. There can be little doubt that these ladies had achieved the respectable status of a proverb by the end of the six­teenth century, but even so, how can we understand them? At first glance, this topos would seem to satirize sexually aggressive women, another example of the venerable topos of the World Turned Upside Down, which in this case reverses the venerable notion that women should be the passive partners in the courting game. Our seven women thus might be considered sisters of the froward maidens criticized in The Hay Chasing the Horse from the Twelve Proverbs. This interpretation, however, is belied by the responses of the object of their struggles, occasionally depicted but always implied in the accompanying verses when they occur: quite undaunted, the male “victim” regards his fate with remarkable complacency, even exultation,

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and it is most likely that at least some contemporary male viewers perused these images in a similar fashion. We can only guess how these man-hungry contenders were descended from Isaiah’s seven presumably honorable women, but their plight seems to have become a joke with various permutations, from a fifteenth-​ century German carnival play to the priapic allusions in the print after Marten de Vos and Adriaen Van de Venne’s tongue-in-cheek account of poor Soetje’s bootless pursuit of the brewer’s son.22 These seven women, in effect, are the counterparts of the men under the thrall of Frau Venus and her like, a theme treated in countless images, plays, and even carnival floats in the later Middle Ages and the sixteenth century. If in Bosch’s Haywain triptych those foolish mortals who grasp so avidly for the vanities and illusions of the world are unmistakably figures of folly, and a deadly folly at that, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the seven ladies who with equal avidity grapple for a pair of male breeches can hardly have been more than figures of fun.

iii In our last category of proverb images, a series of unrelated proverbs united in a single framework, Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs (Fig. 78) is nowadays the best-known picture of its kind, its high status confirmed by that modern touchstone of artistic fame, the jigsaw puzzle, of which there are at least two reproducing Bruegel’s picture. Netherlandish Proverbs also enjoyed considerable fame for a century or so after it was made, to judge from the many copies of it that were produced by its creator’s son Pieter Brueghel the Younger and the latter’s workshop, 23 and it probably inspired the even vaster proverb country in the style of Sebastian Vrancx. Bruegel’s own inspiration, as we have seen, was most likely Frans Hogen­ berg’s Blau Huicke print done probably the previous year. 24 Just how Bruegel transformed his model offers some insights, I think, into the sig­ nificance of his picture. In the first place, he abandoned the casual disposition of Hogenberg’s

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figure 78: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Netherlandish Proverbs, 1559. Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie. Photo: Jörg P. Anders. © Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY.

proverbs for a more coherent village setting, perhaps influenced by a second print, the so-called Proverbs on Sloth, an anonymous sheet pub­lished at Antwerp in the 1540s or the early 1550s (Fig. 79). Its “in­ventor” falsely given in a later state as Hieronymus Bosch,25 the print shows a village street where folk engage in eccentric but unproductive pastimes. From an upper window of the house at the left, a painter, palette in hand, “watches the stork,” as we are told in the verses in­scribed beneath; on the street below, a man “takes his hen for a walk,” while nearby a woman “sows the street with blote billen,” that is “bare bottoms”;26 and in the lower right corner, another woman “picks fleas off her dog.” These and the other fig­ ures illustrate proverbial ex­pres­sions for wasting time, which, we are assured by the verses inscribed above, will result in their poverty. 27 The two changes that Bruegel made on his two putative models were basically those of expansion. Not only did he vastly increase the number of proverbs depicted in Hogenberg’s Blau Huicke, but he also increased the scope of the village setting shown in the anonymous Proverbs on Sloth, placing his scene within a fairly deep landscape, whose fields and woods harbor further proverbs, such as the “Blind leading the blind,” “To catch

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figure 79: Anonymous, Proverbs on Sloth, ca. 1550. Etching and engraving. Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique.

two flies with one clap” (cf. our “To catch two birds with one stone”), and, barely visible in the water at upper right (Fig. 80), a man in a little boat whose sail bears the image of a human eye, signifying “To keep an eye on the sail” (that is, to watch out for trouble).28 The deep space and high horizon line of Bruegel’s picture are not merely compositional devices designed to accommodate additional proverbs. Much more effectively than had Hogenberg, Bruegel expresses the universal extension of human folly, a concept that earlier had inspired Sebastian Brant to launch his Ship of Fools and Erasmus to launch Dame Folly on her long-winded discourse of self-praise. For as Folly herself assures us, quoting Ecclesiastes 1:15, “the number of fools is infinite.”29 The same lesson, of course, is implicit in the Haywain triptych, in which Bosch shows humanity beguiled by the haycart pulled to hell by the Devil

figure 80: Detail of Fig. 78.

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and his minions. But if Bosch shows Christ as both witness and judge of this spectacle of folly, the divine spectator is absent in Bruegel’s picture, leaving us, the human viewers, the sole audience.30 Whereas Bosch presents folly as the result of diabolical intervention, Bruegel presents it essentially as the misuse of human reason. To return to the question raised toward the end of chapter two: How would Bruegel’s contemporaries have responded to his panorama of human folly? We may plausibly imagine that at first sight, people would have approached the painting as a sort of parlor game, vying with each other to identify each proverb portrayed. Some proverb figures would have been easy to identify, others possibly more difficult, especially those tucked away in the distant fields and woods. It might have taken a perceptive viewer to guess that the celestial orb dimly visible in the upper right corner sums up the whole picture in one last proverb: “No one ever spun something so fine that it escaped the sun.”31 Just as we are apt to do now, viewers in Bruegel’s time would have chuckled at these bizarre proverb actors, especially the larger figures in the foreground. The man strewing roses, for example, seems to express open-mouthed surprise at the indifference of the pigs to his largesse; the man who “carries daylight in a basket” strains under the weight of his burden, his eyes and cheeks bulging with exertion; the angry housewife ties a devil to a cushion with a grim determination; the privileged youth balances the world on his thumb with blithe insouciance. The viool player in his tower (see Fig. 51) looks on seemingly in wide-eyed amazement at the strange antics around him. Indeed, all of the inhabitants of this village perform their proverbes en action with a gravity that the rest of us reserve for more serious oc­cu­ pations. They are not unlike the demented inhabitants described in the fifth book of the Gargantua and Pantagruel (whose connection with Rabelais is unclear),32 when Pantagruel and his companions visit the Land of Quintessence and observe the court officials of the Queen of Whims feverishly engaged in proverbial activities of a singularly futile kind. Some officials, for example, plow a sandy shore with three pairs of foxes in a single yoke; others extract water from pumice stones, or shear asses for

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their long fleece (a variation on the pig-shearing housewife in Bruegel’s proverb picture in Berlin), whereas still others milk billy goats into sieves and set their carts before their horses. Many of these proverbs would have been familiar to Rabelais from Erasmus’s Adages.33 Scholars have noted the similarity between this episode and the Berlin painting,34 but there cannot be any connection, as the fifth book was not published until 1564, some years after Bruegel completed Netherlandish Proverbs.35 Neverthe­ less, the analogies between the Land of Quintessence and Netherlandish Proverbs are instructive. They conform strikingly to the definition of the comic as it was expressed many years ago by the French philosopher Henri Bergson (and cited with approbation by Sigmund Freud): the comic figure betrays “a certain mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect to find the wideawake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being.” Elsewhere Bergson speaks of the “simple mechanical action” of such a character “in which its personality would for ever be absorbed.” 36 At opposite poles from the well-conducted citizens of More’s Utopia, Bruegel’s villagers thus have much in common with denizens of the mock towns often featured in Netherlandish satire of the period. At least three of these mythical places must have attained proverbial status, for they are recorded in Andriessoon’s collection of 1550: “He or it has been before Poederoijen,” referring to “someone who returns home destitute,” as An­ driessoon explains:37 “My lady from Lelijkendam” (Uglydam), “said of those not very clean,” and “To be at Uytkerke,” describing one who has lost his property and is almost penniless.38 This last expression appears in the Kampen proverb book of 1550 as “He is completely at Uytkerken.”39 But these hapless creatures could occupy more extensive territories, such as “Plompardije,” whose inhabitants were stupid and uncouth, and which appears in at least one proverb collection of the period. 40 A Shrovetide song published in the Antwerp songbook of 1544 celebrates the realm of the lord of Keyenborch, 41 literally “Stoneberg,” the “stone” alluding to the stone of folly, a cranial growth that, according to contemporary satire, pro­ duced folly in its victims. 42 The subjects of this powerful noble are so many that they cannot be numbered, but they can easily be identified by

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figure 81: “We Are Seven,” French(?), 16th century. Wood. Douai, Musée de la Chartreuse.

the fool’s caps and bells worn by all. 43 Finally, in his Het leenhof der gilden, published in 1564, Jan van den Berghe envisions a vast empire of folly, with kingdoms, duchies and counties, cities and villages, each one har­ boring a particular type of fool. 44 It is tempting to suppose that Bruegel painted his proverb village much in the spirit of such toponymical satire. 45 But to laugh at human folly also betrays a certain superiority on the part of the spectator, or even a moral and intellectual complacency about one’s own merits. This besetting fault was recognized by Christ who admonished, “Why seest thou the mote that is in your brother’s eye; and seest not the beam in thy own eye.”46 Various forms of this parable occur in the proverb collections

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of the period, including the one compiled by Andriessoon and in De Laet’s volume of 1549 (“He is a fool who sees another’s folly, but not his own”). 47 It was depicted by Hogenberg in his Al Hoy print, we may remember, and retained in the copies after it. But much the same lesson was sometimes conveyed more pointedly. A number of depictions, among them a painting by a follower of Adriaen van de Venne, 48 as well as some seventeenth-century prints49 and a French wooden sculpture generally dated to the sixteenth century (Fig. 81), show either a group of fools or fools accompanied by various animals emblematic of folly. In each instance, the image is inscribed “We are Seven,” a phrase whose barb strikes home only after we have counted the personages represented (including any animals present): in each case, there are only six figures, forcing us to con­ clude that we, the viewers, represent the seventh fool. As Erasmus might say, “there is a proverb hidden here,”50 although I have yet to find it in any contemporary proverb collection and perhaps with good reason: while many proverbial expressions are not easy to visualize, “We are Seven” is a basically visual joke whose punch line, as it were, would be difficult if not impossible to convey in words alone. Thus, whatever sort of abuisen Hogenberg intended to catalogue in his Blau Huicke print—either things “strange and odd” or “deceits of the world”—we may plausibly suppose that Bruegel presented the abuisen acted out in Netherlandish Proverbs as figures of both fun and folly, and that his more thoughtful viewers would have seen this picture as a mirror of their own follies as well. For, as we are reminded by one final proverb, this one in a banquet play performed in the very year that Bruegel painted his picture, “We are all fools, the least and the greatest, because no one is wise but God the Father.”51

notes ., preface 1. See Gibson 1977, esp. pp. 65–78.

chapter one. a passion for proverbs 1.

Epigraph: Heywood, preface to Heywood-Habenicht 1963, p. 97. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. and ed. M. A. Screech (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 1991), p. 913 (3:2, “On Repenting”). 2 . For a detailed analysis of these proverbs, see Grauls 1957, pp. 77–117; Mori 1992; as well as Marijnissen and Seidel 1984, pp. 38–43, no. 6, who often give their English equivalents. Many of these proverbs are still understood, if not always used, in Belgium, Holland, and adjacent areas of Germany; see Britta Juska-Bacher, “Zur Bekanntheit und Verwendung von Pieter Bruegels ‘Spricht­ wörtern’ in der Gegenwart—Ein Beitrag zur empirischen Phraseologie des Niederländischen,” Proverbium 23 (2006): 243–85. 3 . So given by Marijnissen and Seidel 1984, p. 39, no. 5; however, in a Netherlandish proverb collection of 1550, the expression describes people who have been deceived or cheated of something hoped for (Andriessoon 2003, pp. 145, 252, no. 88.2). 4 . Tubach 1969, no. 566; cf. The Fables of Odo of Cheriton, trans. and ed. John C. Jacobs (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1985), pp. 129–30, no. 80. 5 . Other details of this figure, including his single shoe and the knife in his right hand, are now obscure in meaning; see Marijnissen and Seidel 1984, p. 40, no. 8. 6 . For this expression, see Gibson 2006, pp. 130–31. 7. See The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, ed. J. A. Simpson (London: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 156, s.v. “Much cry and little wool,” that is, as much profit “as had the man that sheared his hog, much cry and little wool” (citation of 1475). This seems more likely than the reading in Marijnissen and Seidel 1984, p. 40, no. 9: “One man lives in luxury, another in poverty . . . applied to greedy, unscrupulous people.”

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. Recorded in De Laet 1962, p. 3, no. 53; Goedthals 1568, p. 18. 8 9. Marijnissen and Seidel 1984, p. 41, no. 29, note that this could be said of the rich man who gets what he wants but also of one who leads a frivolous life. In the sixteenth century the Bruges rederijker Eduard de Dene described a painting that he saw for sale of a fool “turning the world on his thumb”; see Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Beeld van de andere, vertoog over het zelf: Over wilden en narren, boeren en bedelaars, 1987, cat. by Paul Vandenbroeck, pp. 56–57. 10. The problems involved in interpreting this last picture are well indicated by Philippe Roberts-Jones and François Roberts-Jones, Pieter Bruegel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), pp. 188–91. Not untypical is the explication offered by Pierre Vincken and Lucy Schlüter, “Pieter Bruegels Nestrover en de mens die de dood tegemoet treedt,” in De Jong et al. 1997, pp. 54–79. For Vincken and Schlüter, the peasant in the foreground personifies Everyman who, despite his sinful life, goes forth to meet death confident of his ultimate salvation. 11. Cudden 1999, pp. 706–7. For excellent discussions of proverbs in general, see Taylor 1962; Mieder 2004a; and, for their occurrence in other languages, Trench 2003; Mori 2003b. 12. For a useful compendium of current American proverbs, including regional ones, see Mieder 2004a, pp. 103–8. 13. D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom, eds., Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 8, section 9. This work has been erroneously attributed to Demetrius Phalereus; its author and date are unknown, although it was probably composed in the first century b.c.e. (p. 172). 1 4. Leon Battista Alberti, Dinner Pieces: A Translation of the Intercenales, trans. David Marsh, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 45 (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies in conjunction with the Renais­ sance Society of America, 1987), pp. 154–56, at 154. 15. Quoted from Whiting 1932, p. 287. 16. Joannes Susenbrotus, Epitome Troporum ac Schematum et Grammaticorum et Rhetorium (Antwerp, 1566), quoted from Lee A. Sonnino, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), p. 151. 17. Obelkevich 1987, p. 44. Cf. Heywood-Habenicht 1963, p. 65, in which the editor remarks that the true proverb is always a complete statement, even if in elliptical form. “Long hair, short wit” must be distinguished from mere proverbial expressions such as “merry as a cricket,” which does not epitomize wisdom or admonishment as the true proverb does. 18. Obelkevich 1987, p. 44; the examples cited are his. 19. For the metaphor, see Paul Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process,” in Ricouer 1975, pp. 75–106. Artistotle defines proverbs as a species of metaphor (Aristotle 1984, 2:2255, 1413a, line 15 [Rhetoric, Book 3]). 20. Heywood-Habenicht 1963, p. 65. In his index to Heywood’s poem, Habenicht distinguishes Heywood’s “true” proverbs from proverbial comparisons and epithets, and idiomatic phrases and oaths.

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21. Archer Taylor, “Proverbial Phrases, not Proverbs, in Breughel’s Painting,” ­Proverbium 3 (1965): 57. Some of these “proverbial phrases,” however, could be recast into “true” proverbs: e.g., “Don’t butt your head against the wall” and “Never cast roses before swine.” 22. “When a fable is extremely short, it is indistinguishable from a proverb that is structured as a narration of a past event”; William Hansen, Ariadne’s Thread: A Guide to International Tales Found in Classical Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 41. 23. See Paul Franklin Baum, “The Fable of Belling the Cat,” Modern Language Notes 34 (1919): 426–70, reprinted in Carnes 1988, pp. 37–46. For the fable of the fox and the stork, see Tubach 1969, no. 2170; Marijnissen and Seidel 1984, p. 40, no. 27. A variant appears in David 1606, no. 36, titled “The crane has invited the fox.” For “proverbial fables” in general, see B. E. Perry, “Fable,” Studium ­Generale 12 (1959): 17–37, reprinted in Carnes 1988, pp. 65–116; Pack Carnes, “The Fable and the Proverb: Intertexts and Reception,” Proverbium 8 (1991): 56–76. Other connections between fable and proverb are explored by Van Thiel 1988; Richter 1988. 2 4. For valuable discussions of the proverb, see Mieder 1993, pp. 3–40; Mieder 2004a, pp. 1–9; esp. Schmarje 1973, 1: 38–76, summarized in Hassell 1982, pp. 4–9. Whiting 1932 discusses earlier definitions. An engaging and ­informative earlier survey is F. Edward Hulme, Proverb Lore, ed. Wolfgang Mieder (London, 1902; Burlington: University of Vermont, 2007). 25. Meadow 2002, p. 56; Meadow 2003, p. 15. Concerning proverbs, as early as 1931 Archer Taylor insisted that “an incommunicable quality tells us that this ­sentence is proverbial and that one is not . . . no definition will enable us to identify positively a sentence as proverbial” (Taylor 1962, p. 3, quoted from Mieder 1993, pp. 18–19). 26. But as Mieder 2004a, p. 1, cogently remarks of these and similar contradictory expressions, they “make abundantly clear that proverbs do not represent a ­logical philosophical system.” 27. See Ammer 2006, who compiles an impressive list of clichés and idiomatic expressions, many dating back to the Middle Ages and earlier, and still current in modern English. 28. Robert Hendrickson, The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, 3rd ed. (New York: Checkmark Books, 2004), p. 49. 29. David Pickering, Dictionary of Proverbs (London: Cassell, 1997), p. 203: “The opera isn’t over until the fat lady sings.” See also Mieder 2004a, p. 104. 30. Erasmus 1982–2006, 31:14, lines 8–10, citing Aristotle. 3 1. Aristotle 1984, 2:2191, 1376a, line 118 (Rhetoric, Book 2, 14). 32. See Jan Fredrik Kindstrand, “The Greek Concept of Proverbs,” in Carnes 1988, pp. 233–53. 33. Aristotle 1984, 2:2191, 1375b, lines 27–29 (Book 2, 14). 3 4. Quoted from Whiting 1932, p. 278; see also Aristotle 1984, 2:2223, 1395b, lines 1–3 (Book 2, 21). For other discussions in antiquity of proverbs and related expressions, see Whiting 1932.

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35. Erasmus 1982–2006, 31:17, lines 48–49. For several modern analyses of prov­ erbs as “authority,” see Kirschenblatt-Gimblett 1981, esp. pp. 111–12; Cameron Louis, “Proverbs and the Politics of Language,” Proverbium 17 (2000): 173–94, esp. 177: “Proverbs are a kind of linguistic instrument, a rhetorical device by which people attempt to get other members of their culture and society to see the world and behave in a common way.” The psychological aspects of proverbs and their use are examined by Richard P. Honeck, A Proverb in Mind: The Cognitive Science of Proverbial Wit and Wisdom (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence ­Erlbaum Associates, 1997), esp. pp. 122–74, chapter 4, “Theories of Proverb Cognition.” 36. For this proverb, see Chapter 4. 37. Frank and Miner 1937, pp. 1–3; James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 172–73, 233–34; David L. Bland, “The Use of the Proverb in Two Medieval Genres of Discourse: ‘The Art of Poetry’ and ‘The Art of Preaching,’ ” Proverbium 14 (1997): 1–21. 38. The use of proverbs in medieval literature has generated an enormous literature in itself; see Steiner 1944; Mieder and Bryan 1996; Schulze-Busacker 2000. 39. For the proverbs on bad women mentioned by the Wife of Bath, see ChaucerBenson 1987, p. 115, lines 773–74 (The Wife of Bath’s Prologue); on Chaucer’s use of proverbs generally, see Bertlett Jere Whiting, Chaucer’s Use of Proverbs, Harvard Studies in Com­parative Literature 11 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934). 40. See Celestina 1962. 4 1. Jesús Cantera Ortiz de Urbina, Julia Sevilla Muñoz, and Manuel Sevilla Muñoz, Refranes, otras paremias y fraseologismos en Don Quixote de la Mancha, ed. Wolfgang ­Mieder (Burlington: University of Vermont, 2005). For Cervantes and other writers, see also Eleanor O’Kane, “The Proverb: Rabelais and Cervantes,” ­Comparative Literature 2 (1950): 360–69; Mieder and Bryan 1996. 4 2. Smith 1970; Robert Starr Kinsman, “Proverbs,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990; repr. 1997), pp. 562–65. 4 3. See Charles G. Smith, Shakespeare’s Proverb Lore (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935); R. W. Dent, Proverbial Language in English Drama Exclusive of Shakespeare, 1495–1616: An Index (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 4 4. Solomon and Marcolphus 1995, pp. 139, 141 respectively. I have occasionally modern­ ized the English. For the different kinds of responses given by Marcolphus, see ibid., pp. 27–35. Recent good studies of this text are Curschmann 2000; ­Bradbury 2008. 45. François Villon, Complete Poems, trans. and ed. Barbara N. Sargent-Bauer, Toronto Medieval Texts and Translations 9 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 250–53. 46. See Heywood-Habenicht 1963. Heywood did not fulfill the promise of his title but selected those proverbs that suited his text (ibid., pp. 25–26).

notes to pages 8–9

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47. Ibid., p. 132, lines 1174–75. I have modernized the spelling. For the editions of Heywood’s text, see ibid., pp. 78, 90–94. 4 8. Erasmus lists the ancient authors who are known to have collected proverbs (Erasmus 1982–2006, 31:9–12). For classical and Byzantine collections, see The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 1115–16, s.v. “Paro­ emiographers”; The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander P. Kazhdan and Alice-Mary Talbot, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford Uni­versity Press, 1991), 1:140– 41, s.v. “Apostoles, Michael”; 2:1750, s.v. “Proverb”; pp. 1930–31, s.v. “Souda (Suda).” 4 9. See Schulze-Busacker 2000. A proverb collection for pedagogical use, the Fecunda ratis (Loaded Raft) was compiled sometime before 1024 by Egbert of Liège (Solomon and Marcolphus 1995, p. 15). 50. For the Liber Parobolarum, see Paul F. Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 144. For the popularity of the Distiches of Cato, especially in the Netherlands, see Den duytschen Cathoen: Naar de Antwerpse druk van Henrick Eckert van Homberch, ed. A. M. J. van Buuren, O. S. H. Lie, and A. P. Orbán (Hilversum: Verloren, 1998), esp. pp. 11–32. 51. For the pedagogical use of proverbs, see Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 214, 221, 233, 251; Davis 1975, pp. 230–33. The role that proverbs played in Edmund Spenser’s early education is probably typical of his time; see Smith 1970, pp. 4–5. 52. For the revival of ancient literature in the Renaissance, see esp. L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 108–46. 53. The second edition (1521) of Polydore’s Libellus includes an additional 431 proverbs as well as a tirade against Erasmus, “disputing the latter’s claim to priority in publishing such a collection” (Heywood-Habenicht 1963, p. 18); twenty ­editions appeared before 1550. See Denis Hay, “The Life of Polydore Vergil of Urbino,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 2 (1949): 132–51, esp. 135. The controversy between Vergil and Erasmus ended amicably, with Erasmus overseeing the publication of Vergil’s books in Basel (ibid., p. 146). In any case, according to Appelt 1942, pp. 128–29, as cited by Phillips 1964, p. 47, there is no evidence that Erasmus ever borrowed from Polydore. 5 4. See Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami Opera Omnia, ed. J. Leclerc, 10 vols. (Leiden: Petrus vander Aa, 1703–6; repr. London: Gregg Press, 1962), vol. 2; Erasmus 1982– 2006. For the history and nature of the Adages, see Phillips 1964, pp. 3–165; Erasmus-Phillips 1967, pp. vii–xvi; esp. Erasmus-Barker 2001, pp. ix–xlvii, who also offers a fairly wide selection from the Adages, including the most famous ones. 55. Erasmus-Phillips 1967, p. vii. 56. See Suringer 1873; Appelt 1942 (cited in Phillips 1964); and Wesseling 2002. Cf., e.g., Erasmus 1982–2006, 36:110–11 (IV iv 74), “He is carrying water in one hand and fire in the other,” of which Erasmus remarks, “It is surprising,

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57. 5 8.

5 9. 60. 61.

62.

3. 6 6 4.

65.

66.

notes to pages 9–11

however, that the same saying, in almost the same words, is still on our lips ­today.” Note: Roman and arabic numbers in parentheses refer to the numbering of the proverbs’ earliest and most subsequent editions of the Adagia; hence, “IV iv 74” identifies the proverb as number 474 in the fourth thousand. For some of the most famous commentaries, see Erasmus-Phillips 1967; ErasmusBarker 2001. Erasmus 1982–2006, 31:4. Concerning this definition, Whiting 1932, p. 289, says, “it has no definite bearing on the subject.” Erasmus would have found ­equally broad definitions of proverbs in antiquity; see, e.g., Aristotle, who, as we have seen, classified proverbs as a form of metaphor; see Aristotle 1984, 2:2255 (Rhetoric 3.1413a, lines 15–34). Schmarje 1973, p. 71, bases her definition on that of Erasmus: “A proverbial utterance is a popular, short saying, which wins ­attention by means of a detectable ring, which distinguishes it from ordinary speech put together with freely selected words (English translation in Hassell 1982, p. 8). Nevertheless, Erasmus sought to distinguish the proverb from its “near neighbors,” including the aphorism and the fable (1982–2006, 31:7–9). Erasmus 1982–2006, 31:21–28 (introduction, section xiii). Ibid., p. 25, section 2: “From similar things.” Ibid., 31:17–18. Cf. also the ways of varying speech and writing by metaphor and allegory prescribed in Desiderius Erasmus, On the Copia of Words and Ideas (De Utraque Verborum ac Rerum Copia), trans. and intro. Donald P. King and H. David Rix (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1963), pp. 28–30, and on the use of maxims (which he calls sententiae), pp. 80–82. In his introduction, e.g., Erasmus says that the proverb “ ‘Gifts of enemies are no gifts,’ can be shifted to fit gifts from the poor, from flatterers, from poets; . . . In a word, you may freely arrange this comparison in any way which it will fit.” See Erasmus 1982–2006, 31:20, section xii. Ibid., 31:28, chapter xiv. See also Celestina 1962. For the first two proverbs, see Erasmus 1982–2006, 31:87–88 (I i 39) and p. 274 (I iii 45) respectively. For the third, see ibid., 33:105 (II ii 60), with variants in De Laet 1962, p. 17, no. 281: “I will go fishing with a silver hook, that is to say, buy a fish”; and in Kamper spreekwoorden 1959, p. 70, line 27: “He fishes with a silver hook.” Cf. also Erasmus 1988–2006, 36:558 (V i 27), “Beat one’s brow,” about which he remarks, “Anyone who thinks this isn’t a proverb will have to reject ‘to wipe off your blushes’ and ‘thumbs down’ and many other sayings referring to physical gestures.” Other examples in the Adages, includ­ing those for which Erasmus approvingly cites the opinions of his sources, include 31:248 (I iii 15), line 30, “a proverb is lying concealed,” p. 249 (I iii 16), line 30, “a proverb ­lurking”; and 35:264 (III vii 74), “more or less a proverb.” Erasmus 1982–2006, 35:257 (IV iv 96) and 34:315 (III iii 99) respectively. For other examples, see ibid., 34:296 (III iii 42), 304 (III iii 66), and 35:4 (III iv 2, 3), and p. 550 (IV ii 97). Such proverbs are generally cited from the Byzan­ tine writer Apostolicus, for whom Erasmus could find no authentic classical sources. This is the epithet assigned him by an English friend and admirer; see Richard

notes to pages 11–12

67.

68. 69.

70.

7 1.

72.

73.

163

Pace, De Fructu qui ex Doctrina Percipitur (The Benefit of a Liberal Education), ed. and trans. Frank Manley and Richard S. Sylvester (New York: Frederick Ungar for the Renaissance Society of America, 1967), p. 81. For the epitomes of Erasmus’s Adages intended for the schools and the various German and Netherlandish proverb collections published in the first half of the sixteenth century, see the excellent discussion in Meadow 2003. An English collection is Richard Taverner, Proverbes or adgies with newe addicions gathered out of the Chiliades of Erasmus (London: Richard Banks, 1539). Heinrich Bebel, Proverbia Germanica, ed. W. H. D. Suringer (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1879); Johannes Agricola, Die Sprichtwörter Sammlungen (see Agricola 1971); for Sebastian Franck’s collection, see Franck-Mieder 1987. Charles de Bouvelles, Proverbiorum Vulgarium . . . Libri Tres (Paris, 1531); see Collette Demaizière, “Un humaniste s’interesse aux dits et façons de parler français: Les deux recueils de proverbes de Charles de Bovelles,” in Charles de Bovelles en son cinquième centenaire, 1479–1979, Actes du colloque international tenu à Noyon les 14–15–16 septembre 1979 (Paris: Guy Trédaniel, 1989), pp. 231–43. For sixteenth-century French proverb collections in general, see Davis 1975, pp. 233–45. Prov. Comm. 1947; Meadow 2002, pp. 69–72. The Proverbia Communia includes two sayings that appear in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, each one characterized “as the flemyng saith,” raising the tantalizing but unverifiable possibility that the Netherlanders had gained a reputation for their proverbs early on. See Jan Grauls and Jan F. Vanderheijden, “Two Flemish Proverbs in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 13 (1934): 745–48. For the first German edition of the Proverbia Communia, see Bob W. Th. Duijvestijn, “Die erste deutsche Übersetzung der niederländischen Sprichtwortsammlung ‘Proverbia Com­ munia,’ ” Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter 53 (1989): 52–91. Related in form and function are the “commonplace books,” compilations of mostly Latin quotations, including proverbs, originally assembled by students during their reading and later issued as printed collections; see Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). For Netherlandish proverb collections published in the sixteenth century, see the lists complied in Ter Laan 1952, pp. 309–11; Meadow 1993; and Mori 2003b, pp. 191–92. For those published at Antwerp in Bruegel’s lifetime, including epitomes of Erasmus’s Adagia, see Sullivan 1991, pp. 440–41, n. 107. See De Laet 1962. Here is perhaps a good place to note that the language we call “Flemish” or “Dutch,” and which throughout this book I refer to as “Nether­ landish” (Nederlands), was in the sixteenth century called by various names. They include Vlaemsch or Flameng (i.e., Flemish, originally designating the language spoken in the county of Flanders); Duytsch (whence our word “Dutch”), ­derived from Duytsch, or “German”; and Neder­duytsch (Low German), describing the German dialect spoken in the Lowlands and distinguishing it from Hoog­ duytsch, or High German, the language spoken elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire. This variety of terminologies is well illustrated by the titles of the

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7 4. 75. 76. 7 7. 7 8. 79. 8 0. 81.

2. 8 83.

84.

85. 86. 87. 88.

notes to pages 12–14

entries in F. Claes, Lijst van Nederlandse woordenlijsten en woordenboeken gedrukt tot 1600, Bibliotheca Bibliographica Neerlandica, vol. 4 (Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf, 1974). Bonne response 1960, pp. 3–8. Andriesson 2003, pp. 60, 167. Kamper spreekwoorden 1959; see also Meadow 2002, pp. 74–76, who notes that the compiler is unknown, but the publisher himself has been suggested. Kamper spreekwoorden 1959, p. 12, no. 7; p. 29, no. 19; and p. 15, no. 14 respectively; the editor notes the occurrence of the latter proverb in De Laet’s collection, but I cannot find it in De Laet 1962. Kamper spreekwoorden 1959, p. 42, line 26; p. 43, line 9. Ibid., p. 41, line 27, taken from Agricola’s collection, no. 577. Ibid., “An den leser.” Similarly, the title of the 1547 edition of Bonne response promises that this volume is a very pleasant and delectable book containing proverbs for use in any company; see Bonne response 1960, title page. See, e.g., V. Hallut, “L’oeuvre de Peter Brueghel au point de vue folklorique et brabançon,” Le folklore Brabaçon 4 (1924): 31–36. Vandenbroeck 1987a, pp. 221– 27, argues convincingly that even such medieval collections as the Proverbes ruaux et vulgas (Peasant and Folk Proverbs) and Li proverbes au vilains (Peasant Proverbs), both of the late twelfth century, had little to do with the actual speech of the common folk. This is well explored in Van den Branden 1967. For the controversy over Cicero as the exclusive model for Renaissance Latin, see Dellaneva and Duvick 2007. Erasmus believed that writers should base their style on many Latin authors; see Desiderius Erasmus, The Ciceronian, a ­Dialogue on the Ideal Latin Style: Dialogus Ciceronianus, trans. Betty I. Knott, Collected Works of Erasmus 28 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). On the controversies between the humanist exponents of classical Latin and the defenders of medieval scholastic Latin, see Erika Rummel, The HumanistScholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). See Atkinson 1974, esp. pp. 179–81. For Erasmus’s views on the vernacular, see Rachel Giese, “Erasmus’ Knowledge and Estimate of the Vernacular Lan­guages,” Romanic Review 28 (1937): 3–28. Geise, “Erasmus’ Knowledge,” pp. 15–16; Manfred Hoffmann, Rhetoric and ­Theology: The Hermaneutic of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), p. 67 and n. 26 with further references. Vives: On Education; A Translation of the “De tradendis disciplinis” of Juan Luis Vives, trans. Foster Watson, foreword by Francesco Cordasco (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1971), pp. 91–92 (Book 3, chapter 1). For Bartholomaeus, see Jozef Ijsenwijn, “The Coming of Humanism to the Low Countries,” in Itinerarium Italicum: The Profile of the Italian Renaissance in the Mirror of Its European Transforma­tions; Dedicated to Paul Oskar Kristeller on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday, ed. Heiko A. Oberman and Thomas A. Brady Jr. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975), pp. 193–301, esp. 271–72. See also Victor 1978, p. 30. Some Italian

notes to pages 14–15

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humanists believed that writing in the vernacular would ruin their Latin style; see Dellaneva and Duvick 2007, pp. xxv, xxviii. 89. Davis 1975, pp. 236–37. 9 0. Victor 1978, p. 30; for Bouvelles’s linguistic writings, see ibid., pp. 29–31. 91. This new esteem for the vernacular reflects the rising nationalism in sixteenthcentury Europe, especially in the Germanic lands; see Frank L. Borchardt, ­German Antiquity in Renaissance Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), pp. 98–176; Leonard Krieger, “Germany,” in National Consciousness, History, and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Orest A. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), pp. 67–97, esp. 77–82. For the cultural back­ ground of “linguistic nationalism” in Germany, see Larry Silver, “Germanic ­Patriotism in the Age of Dürer,” in Dürer and His Culture, ed. Dagmar Eichberger and Charles Zika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 38–68. The reevaluation of the vernacular languages was spurred by Renaissance ­speculations on the language spoken by Adam and its diversification at the Tower of Babel, for which see Borst 1957–63, vol. 3, part 1, pp. 1048–150. 92. Margolin 1985. 93. For Italy and France, see Atkinson 1974; for France, see Clément 1898, pp. 389– 99; Davis 1975, pp. 238–39; Victor 1978, pp. 27–31. In England, “linguistic nationalism” appears only in later sixteenth century, when “inkhorn terms,” borrowed from Latin and other languages, were disparaged in favor of “genuine” English monosyllabic words; see Cecil Grayson, “The Growth of Linguistic National Consciousness in England,” in Fairest Flower 1985, pp. 167–73; useful, too, is Borst 1957–63, vol. 3, part 1, pp. 1056–87. 94. Du Bellay 2006, pp. 317–413. 95. Clément 1898, pp. 394–95. 96. Henri Estienne, Project du livre intitulé De la précellence du langage Français (Paris: Henri Estienne, 1579), pp. 110–201. See also Clément 1898, pp. 389–99, for Estienne’s use of proverbs in general. 97. Röhrich and Mieder 1977, pp. 41–44. Nevertheless, despite the rise of “linguistic nationalism,” Latin continued for centuries as the international language of diplomats, scholars, and travelers; see Peter Burke, “ ‘ Hue Domine, Adsunt Turcae’: A Sketch for a Social History of Post-Medieval Latin,” in The Art of Conversation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 34–65. 98. James C. Cornette Jr., Proverbs and Proverbial Expressions in the German Works of Martin Luther, ed. Wolfgang Mieder and Dorothy Racette, Sprichtwörter­ forschung, Bd. 19 (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997). See also Eric W. Gritsch, “Luther as Bible Translator,” in The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 62–72. While Luther “loved his mother language as none other among the Humanists,” his linguistic interests were purely religious, not nationalistic (Borst 1957– 63, vol. 3, part 1, pp. 1066–67 and 1069 respectively). 99. Martin Luther, On Translation: An Open Letter (1530), trans. Charles M. Jacobs, in Works of Martin Luther, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1930–43), 5:10– 27, at 16. For similar opinions of the English reformers, see James Simpson,

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notes to pages 15–17

Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 60–62. 100. Jan Gymnick, Titus Livius: Dat is de Roemsche historie oft Gesten (Antwerp: Jan Grapheus, 1541); see Van den Branden 1967, pp. 12–15. 101. Van den Branden 1967, pp. 13–14. 102. Jan van den Werve, Het tresoor der Duytscher talen (Antwerp: Hans de Laet, 1553); see Van den Branden 1967, pp. 20–26; for the passage quoted, 21. 103. Van den Branden 1967, p. 22. 104. Lucas de Heere, in a dedicatory poem to Jan van der Noot’s Het Theatre oft toonneel (London: J. Day, 1568); see Van den Branden 1967, p. 38; and Jan van der Noot, Het Bosken en Het Theatre, ed. W. A. P. Smit, with W. Vermeer (Utrecht: HES Publishers, 1979), p. 190. 105. Van den Branden 1967, pp. 43–44; George J. Metcalf, “The Indo-European Hypothesis in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Studies in the History of Languages: Traditions and Paradigms, ed. Dell Hymes (Bloomington: Indiana Uni­ versity Press, 1974), pp. 233–57, esp. 239, 241–44; see also Borst 1957–63, vol. 3, part 1, pp. 1215–18. Thus, according to Becanus, ancient Hebrew borrowed many words from Netherlandish, the language from which all others are descended (Borst, ibid., p. 1216). For similar ideas among sixteenth-century Friesians on the biblical antiquity of their origins, see Wiebe Bergsma, De wereld volgens Abel Eppens: Een ommelander boer uit de zestiende eeuw (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhof/ Forsten; Leeuwarden: Fryske Akademy, 1988), pp. 48–50. A striking manifes­ tation of linguistic nationalism occurs in the ceremonial entry of Emperor Charles V and his son Prince Philip (later Philip II of Spain) into Ghent in July 1549: one of the triumphal arches carried inscriptions in Old High German, the language spoken by Charlemagne and the ancestor of the Netherlandish tongue; see Leonard Forster, “Old High German in Ghent in 1549,” in Modern Dutch Studies: Essays in Honour of Peter King, ed. Michael Wintle and Paul Vincent (London: Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 105–15, 290–92. 106. Among them were the two philologists Justus Lipsius and Joseph Justus Scaliger (Borst 1957–64, vol. 3, part 1, pp. 1218–19 and 1121 respectively). Similarly, in his guide to French, the Ortho-epia Gallica of 1593, John Eliot complained that while the Flemish claim to speak the language of Eden, they actually speak “a barbarous gibber-Jybber” (Van den Branden 1967, pp. 43–47). 107. Abraham Mylius, Lingua Belgica (Leiden, 1612). See Borst 1957–63, vol. 3, part 1, pp. 1223–24. 108. At least one writer, however, Juan Luis Vives, claimed that the Latin, the most perfect of all languages, probably had been “the language in which Adam ­attached the names to things”; Vives 1971, p. 92 (Book 3, chapter 2). 109. For a convenient discussion of Germanic languages, see Charles Barber, The English Language: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 81–99. 110. Metcalf 1953, esp. pp. 541–42; Borst 1957–63, vol. 3, part 1, pp. 1223–24. 1 11. See Schenkeveld 1991, pp. 137–138; her claim that Mylius called Dutch the oldest language should be discounted. See Metcalf 1953, p. 543.

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112. Philipp Cluvier, Germaniae Antiquae Libri Tres (Leiden, 1616). See Borst 1957–64, vol. 3, part 1, pp. 1225–26.

chapter two. the proverb portrayed Epigraph: Erasmus, De Ratione Studii ac Legendi Interpretandique Auctores. See n. 35 below. 1. See Whiting 1932, p. 280; Erasmus 1982–2006, 31:1. For Diomedes and his Ars grammatica (late fourth century c.e.), see Brills New Pauly: Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World, ed. Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider (Leiden: Brill, 2002–), 4:463. 2. Isidore of Seville 2006, p. 63 (1.37.22). 3. Erasmus 1982–2006, 31:31–32 (I i 2, lines 29–30), concerning a group of prov­ erbs attributed to Pythagoras. 4. Massing 1995, p. 25. Cf. Ricoeur 1975, p. 114, who, with respect to proverbs and parables, speaks of a “re-orientation by disorientation.” 5. Cf. Cudden 1999, p. 412, s.v. “Idiom.” 6. As Henri Bergson observed long ago (Bergson 2005, p. 57), “a comic effect is obtained whenever we pretend to take literally an expression which was used figuratively; . . . Once our attention is fixed on the material aspect of a metaphor the idea expressed becomes comic.” 7. Till Eulenspiegel 1972, pp. 118–20 (no. 47: “How Eulenspiegel hired himself out to a tailor”). 8. Ibid., pp. 116–17 (no. 46: “How Eulenspiegel became a brewer’s assistant”). 9. Ibid., p. 107 (no. 42: “How Eulenspiegel worked for a shoemaker”). In his ­appendix to Till Eulenspiegel 1972, pp. 267–79, Paul Oppenheimer explores ­Eulenspiegel’s habit of taking words literally, calling him a “linguistic philoso­ pher” (pp. 267, 278). 10. See the excellent discussions on this subject by Bowen 1974, pp. 40–46; Halina Lewicka, “Un procédé comique: La fausse compréhension du langage,” in Lewicki, Études sur l’ancienne farce français, Bibliothèque français et romane, série A, Manuel et études linguistiques 27 (Paris: Éditions Klinckieck; Warsaw: ­Éditions Scientifiques de Pologne, 1974), pp. 67–72. Some striking examples from the folk book Solomon and Marcolphus are discussed by Malcolm Jones, “Marcolf the Trickster in Late Mediaeval Art and Literature or: The Mystery of the Bum in the Oven,” in Spoken in Jest, ed. Gillian Bennett (Sheffield: University of Sheffield Press, 1991), pp. 139–74. 11. In the play Farce de l’Arbalète, early sixteenth century; see Bowen 1974, pp. 42–43; Bowen 1998, p. 63. 12. Nyeuwe clucht boeck 1983, pp. 92–93, no. 32. 13. Bowen 1998, pp. 62–63. 1 4. Rabelais-Screech 2006, pp. 241–42 (Book 1, chapter 10). Much later, the American humorist James Thurber recounts that when as a child he heard grownups refer to the man who left town “under a cloud,” for example, or the woman who “was all ears,” or the little girl who “cried her heart out,” such turns

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15. 16. 17. 1 8. 19.

20.

21. 2 2. 23.

2 4.

notes to pages 19–21

of speech conjured in his mind visions that matched, if not surpassed, the paintings of Salvador Dalí; see Thurber, “The Secret Life of James Thurber,” in The Thurber Carnival (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1945), pp. 22–24. Marijnissen and Seidel 1984, p. 41, no. 30. This explanation is given in ibid., p. 40, no. 16. Cf. Sachs 1966, 2:446, in which the expression den tag im Korb herumtragen (to carry the day in a basket) is similarly defined as “müssiggehen,” “to waste time.” Andriessoon 2003, pp. 158, 265, no. 101.5. The literature on proverb pictures is vast, but see Mieder and Sobieski 1999. Erasmus 1982–2006, 31:344–45 (I iv 35). See Gibson 2007–8; to which may be added Martin Vogel, Onos Lyras: Der Esel met dem Leier, 2 vols. (Düsseldorf: Verlag der Gesellschaft zur Förderung der ­systematischen Musikwissenschaft, 1973), pp. 351–71, on the Asinus ad lyram and related subjects in art. I am indebted to Wolfgang Mieder for this reference. Randall 1966, p. 200, s.v. “Proverbs.” See also Lilian M. C. Randall, “Exempla as a Source of Gothic Marginal Illumination,” Art Bulletin 39, no. 2 (1957): 97– 107, in which she notes (101) that proverbs often drive home the point of many exempla, which were little moral stories popular with medieval preachers. MS 158. See Rudy 2007, who names the volume after the initials, presumably of the original owners, occurring several times in the manuscript. She suggests, pp. 329–33 that the manuscript illuminators worked from models, perhaps prints. Marijnissen and Seidel 1984, p. 41, no. 35; Gibson 1992b, p. 75. See Elaine C. Block, Corpus of Medieval Misericords in several volumes. Already published (with the pages listing proverbs) are France, XIII–XVI Centuries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), p. 227; Iberia: Portugal–Spain, XIII–XVI Centuries (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 83–84; a volume on Belgium and the Nether­ lands is forthcoming. Also useful are Christa Grossinger, The World Turned UpsideDown: English Misericords (London: Harvey Miller, 1997), pp. 88–89, figs. 121, 123–24, p. 118, fig. 163; Jones 1989. For Netherlandish examples, see Ver­ spaandonck 1974–75, pp. 134–40; idem, Amsterdam: De koorbanken van de Oude Kerk (Amsterdam: Buijten en Schipperheim, 1984), pp. 12–13; Herman A. van ­Duinen, De Koorbanken van de Grote- of Onze Lieve Vrouwkerk te Dordrecht (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 1997), pp. 113–51, nos. NA-10, NV-13, ZA-4, ZA-10. The two manuscripts are Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, W. 313, and London, British Library, MS Add. 37527. For the Walters manuscript, see Frank and Miner 1937; Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Walters Art Gallery, vol. 2, France, 1420–1540, by Lilian M. C. Randall with Christopher Clarkson and Jeanne Krochalis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press in association with the Walters Art Gallery, 1992), part 2, pp. 366–75, no. 176, with ­bibliography. Two additional leaves are in Paris (Musée Marmottan; see Jean Michel Massing, “Proverbial Wisdom and Social Criticism: Two New Pages from the Walter Art Gallery’s Proverbes en Rimes,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Instititues 46 [1983]: 208–10 and pls. 29b–31b). The London manuscript is discussed in Grace Frank, “Proverbes en rimes (B),” Romanic Review 31, no. 1 (February 1940): 209–38.

notes to pages 22–24

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25. A striking example of the last-named proverb occurs in a collection of ­Netherlandish edifying texts compiled in the later fifteenth century. Carrying the usual fire and water, the male figure’s duplicitous nature is emphasized by his double face; see Luc Indestege, Middelnederlandse geestelijke gedichten, liederen, ­rijmspreuken en exempelen, Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal-en Letter­ kunde, reeks 3, nr. 33 (Ghent: Drukkerij Erasmus, [1951]), pp. 100–101 and fig. 4. The image and accompanying verse were perhaps adapted from some proverb collection like the Baltimore manuscript. 26. Frank and Miner 1937, p. 9. 27. Massing 1995. 2 8. Hollstein 1954–, 24:187, no. 487; 25, ill. p. 196; for the texts, see David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 62–63; Grössinger 2002, pp. 84–85 and fig. 93. Uselful, too, is Diane G. Scillia, “The Audience for Israhel van Meckenem’s Proverb Imagery, Circa 1500,” in In Detail: New Studies of Northern Renaissance Art in Honor of Walter S. Gibson, ed. Laurinda S. Dixon (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 83–94. 29. Marijnissen and Seidel 1984, p. 42, no. 62. 30. See Malcolm Jones, “Cats and Cat-skinning in Late Medieval Art and Life,” in Flora and Fauna in the Middle Ages: Studies of the Medieval Environment and Its Impact on the Human Mind; Papers Delivered at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, in 2000, 2001 and 2002, ed. Siegelinde Hartmann, Beihefte zur Mediaevistik, vol. 8 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 97–110, esp. 100. 31. Brant-Zeydel 1962, nos. 6 (p. 72), 18 (p. 102), and 110 (p. 357) respectively. 32. See the facsimile of Thomas Murner, Der Schelmen Zunft 1512, intro. W. Scherer (Berlin: Königlichen Hof Steindruckerei [Gebr. Burchard], 1881). The woodcuts of the third and fourth editions (1513, 1514) were designed by Hans Burgkmair; see Hollstein 1954–, 5:145, nos. 751–89; Stuttgart, Graphische Sammlung Staatsgalerie, 1473–1973, Hans Burgkmair: Das Graphische Werk, 1973, cat. by Isolde Hausberger and Rolf Biederman, p. 71, no. 84, figs. 100a–d. The Narrenbeschwörung uses some of the woodcuts from Brant’s Narrenschiff, others were designed by Urs Graf, for which see Hollstein 1954–, 11:125– 28, nos. 268–85. 33. Geisberg-Strauss 1974, 1:324–25, nos. G.354, G355. The first proverb is also illustrated in a woodcut by Urs Graf in Mürner’s Narrenbeschwörung (Hollstein 1954–, 11:128, no. 285, not ill.). 3 4. Sachs 1966, 2:246, where die Ohren melken (to milk the ears) is defined as “to flatter, wheedle, or fawn upon.” Cf. a variant, Oleum in auricula ferre (to carry oil in the ear), cited by Erasmus 1982–2006, 1:442 (I v 63), who suggests several meanings for this phrase, including a reference to flatterers. Another variant, illustrated in Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs in Berlin, is discussed in Sullivan 1991, p. 453; Grosshans 2003, p. 94. Comparable is the Netherlandish orenblazer (to blow into the ear, i.e., to flatter); see Kamper spreekwoorden 1959, p. 21, no. 9: “No greater virtue for a lord and prince than never to believe any babbler or ear-blower.”

170

notes to pages 25–29

35. Desiderius Erasmus, De Ratione Studii ac Legendi Interpretandique Auctores, trans. and annotated by Brian McGregor, in Literary and Educational Writings, ed. Craig R. Thompson, 2 vols., in Collected Works of Erasmus 23–24 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 2:671; also cited by Goldstein 2000, p. 179. 36. For such decorations, see New York 1995. 3 7. Erasmus-Thompson 1965, pp. 46–78, esp. 50–55, 62. 38. Erasmus 1982–2006, 33:156–60 (II iii 48), at 158. 39. Frank and Miner 1937, pp. 4–6. An earlier example occurs in an inventory of 1364 of the effects of Louis, duke of Anjou; one entry lists an enameled silvergilt pot decorated with “plusieurs proverbes” (Jones 1989, p. 205). 40. François Avril and Nicole Reynaud, Les manuscrits à peintures en France, 1440–1520 (Paris: Flammarion et Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1993), p. 355. I do not know of any painted-glass panels depicting proverbs from this period, although there is evidence of them in the later sixteenth century. 41. Ella S. Siple, “A ‘Flemish Proverb’ Tapestry in Boston,” Burlington Magazine 33, no. 364 (July 1933): 29–35; Jan Grauls, “Een vijftiendeeuws spreekwoorden tapijt,” Artes Textiles 3 (1956): 14–26; Adolph S. Cavallo, Textiles: Isabella Stewart Gardner ­Museum (Boston, 1986), pp. 30–31, with color ill.; Mieder 2004b, colorpl. 1. Other proverbs depicted include the pillar biter, belling the cat, carrying fire in one hand and water in the other, and falling between two stools. 4 2. Goldstein 2000, p. 173 and passim. 4 3. Joos de Coo, “Twaalf spreuken op borden van Pieter Bruegel de Oude,” Bulletin, Musées des Beaux-Arts de Belgique 14 (1965): 83–104; De Coo 1975. While Van Schoute and Verougestraete 2000, p. 145, read the fragmentary date on the Antwerp Twelve Proverbs as 1559, De Coo (“Twaalf spreuken,” pp. 97–103), on stylistic grounds, believes that the series was done some years after Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs of 1559. 4 4. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. 638C. See Franz Winzinger, Albrecht Altdorfer: Die Gemälde (Munich: Hirmer Verlag; Munich: R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1975), p. 104, no. 53, figs. 53, 53a. My warmest thanks go to Elizabeth Kiefer for assistance with the English translation of the proverb Der Bettel sitz der Hoffart auf der Schleppe. See also Campbell Dodgson, “Two Illustrations of a German Proverb,” ­Burlington Magazine 26, no. 142 (January 1915): 144–46, who also notes an approximately contemporary drawing of the same subject by Sebald Beham (London, British Museum), unrelated in composition. 45. See Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, Patinir: Essays and Critical Catalogue, 2007, ed. Alejandro Vergara. 46. The inscription reads “Met recht sovdic gerne doer de werelt commen ic bender doer mae ic moet crommen.” For a good color ill., see Hazelzet 2006, p. 41, fig. 2. 47. Rudy 2007, pp. 319 and 327, pl. xxviii; Verspaandonk 1974–75, p. 140, fig. 41. 4 8. Erasmus 1982–2006, 31:87–88 (I i 39). 49. Ibid., 35:57 (IV iv 96); see also Suringer 1873, pp. 173–75, no. 96; Vandenbroeck 1987a, fig. 47, pp. 226 and 451 n. 200, for other instances of the proverb’s ­occurrence, including the variant recorded in De Laet 1962, p. 2, no. 23: “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is called monsieur.”

notes to pages 29–32

171

50. S. Gudlaugsson, “Het Nederlandsche voorbeeld voor een Indisch miniatuur uit den Mogeltijd,” Kunsthistorische mededelingen van het Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, ’s-Gravenhage 1, no. 1 (1946): 1–3; Kostyshyn 1994, 2:777–78, no. 111, who notes 4, possibly 5, versions. 51. In modern Netherlandish, it would read “De [the letter D] werelt [imperial globe] voedt [play on the word voet, or “foot”] vele [play on the word viool or “violin”] zotten [i.e., the two fools]. 52. See Margolin 1986, pp. 137–62, chapter 4, “Rébus et proverbes.” 53. Good introductions to the rederijkers include Anne-Laure van Bruaene, “ ‘A wonderfulle tryumpfe, for the wynning of a pryse’: Guilds, Ritual, Theater, and the Urban Network in the Southern Low Countries, ca. 1450–1650,” Renaissance Quarterly 59, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 374–405; Dirk Coigneau, “De Const van Rhetoriken: Drama and Delivery,” in Rhetoric—Rhétoriquers—Rederijkers, ed. Jelle Koopmans et al., Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Verhande­lingen, Afd. Letterkunde, nieuwe reeks, deel 162 (Amsterdam: NoordHolland, 1995), pp. 123–40; Elsa Streitman and Peter Happé, eds., Urban Theatre in the Low Countries, 1400–1625, Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, vol. 12 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006); Pleij 2007, pp. 295–464. Other than in the case of the Violieren, the relation of artists and rederijkers in the Netherlands has not been explored systematically, but see Gibson 1981; see also Veldman 1977, pp. 124–41, for Maerten van Heemskerck’s association with De Wijngaardranken chamber of Haarlem. 5 4. See Gibson 1981; see also B. A. M. Ramakers, “Bruegel en de rederijkers: Schil­ derkunst en literatuur in de zestiende eeuw,” in De Jong et al. 1997, pp. 81–105. 55. C. Kruyskamp, ed., Het Antwerpse Landjuweel van 1561: Een keuze uit de vertoonde stukken, Klassieke Galerij, no. 146 (Antwerp: De Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1962); and esp. Brussels 1994. 56. See the examples in Brussels 1994 as well as in C. P. Burger, “De rebus van onze oude rederijkers,” Het Boek 14 (1925): 145–92; A. Keersmaekers, “RederijkersRebusblasoenen in de zestiende-seventiende eeuw,” in Vekeman and MüllerHofstede 1984, pp. 217–19; Margolin 1986, pp. 219–46. 57. Van den Branden 1967, pp. 34–35, notes (34) the importance that the rederijkers generally placed on improving their mother tongue. 58. Ibid., pp. 168–76; Schenkeveld 1991, p. 13; Schama 1987, p. 58. 59. Schama 1987, p. 58. 60. Meadow 2003, pp. 29–30. Titled Adagia ofte spreeckwoorde, the manuscript (Ghent, University Library, UB R524b) bears an indistinct date read by Meadow as 1552. Gheurtsz also copied a number of plays for De Eglentier. For Gheurtsz’s career as a rederijker, see Marijke Spies, “Rederijkers en Reformatie in de tweede helft van de zestiende eeuw in Amsterdam,” De zeventiende eeuw 8, no. 1 (1992): 66–74, esp. 66–67. 61. Van Kampen et al. 1980, p. 57. 62. Hummelen 1958, p. 386, notes that in the rederijker plays, it is typically the zot (also spelled sot), or fool, who takes literally the words spoken by the other characters.

172

notes to pages 33–35

63. For the liberal use of proverbs in some other genres of rederijker literature, see Colijn Caillieu, Dal sonder wederkeren of Pas der Doot, ed. Paul de Keyser, Werken uitgegeven door de Faculteit der Wijsbegeerte en Letteren, 73rd Aflevering (Antwerp: De Sikkel; Paris: Librairie Ernest Leroux; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1936), pp. 26–29; Van Gelder 1911, esp. p. 229, where he compares the play ’t Spel van der Hel (ca. 1545) to Bruegel’s proverb compositions for its richness of proverbs. Further examples are cited in Coigneau 1980–83, index, s.v. “Spreekwoord(elijk).” 6 4. Rethoricale Werck[en] v[an] Anthomis de Roovere (Antwerp: Jan van Ghelen, 1562); see De Roovere 1955, pp. 23–24. 65. De Roovere 1955, pp. 320–21. 66. Andriessoon 2003, pp. 69, 176, no. 12.2: “He who lives with a cripple will also learn to limp. That is: one generally observes and learns from those with whom one keeps company; that is, good with the good, and bad with the bad.” Cf. Kamper spreekwoorden 1959, p. 50, no. 33; De Laet 1962, p. 27, no. 453. The ­proverb appears in Plutarch’s Moralia 1.7. 6 (On the Education of Children); see Plutarch’s Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt, Loeb Classical Library, 14 vols. (London: William Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putman’s Sons, 1927), 1:3, par. 6, 3. But see Suringer 1873, pp. 67–70, no. 45, who also associates this with a second proverb: “It is bad stealing where the tavern keeper is a thief,” meaning, possibly, that trying to compete with an expert in his field or on his own turf is wasted effort. 67. Van Doesborch-Kruyskamp 1940, pp. 209–10, no. cxv, and pp. 157–62, no. lxxxiv respectively. For what seem to be other proverbial expressions, see also pp. 192–96, no. cvi, pp. 110–12, no. lvii, pp. 244–46, no. cxxxii, and pp. 237– 39, no. cxxxi. 68. For the role of women in the rederijker kamers, see Anne-Laure van Bruaene, “Brotherhood and Sisterhood in the Chambers of Rhetoric in the Southern Low Countries,” Sixteenth Century Journal 36, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 11–35; for Anna Bijns, see pp. 30–32. 69. Bijns 1875, pp. 18–21, no. vi (cf. Matthew 7:16, 20), and pp. 35–38, no. xi (John 8:7) respectively. 70. Lode Roose, Anna Bijns: Een rederijkster uit de Hervormingstijd, Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal-en-Letterkunde, VIe reeks, nr. 93 (Ghent: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal-en-Letterkunde, 1963), pp. 84–85, Refr. 77, and pp. 109–10, Refr. xxxv respectively. Roose notes an earlier suggestion that the last-cited poem is directed against the Lutherans. For a modern Netherlandish translation of first-cited refereijn, dated 1528, see Anna Bijns, Meer zuurs dan zoets, ed. Lode Roose (Hasselt: Uitgeverij Heideland, 1968), pp. 14–15: ’T es verloren rozen voor zogen gestrooid. 7 1. For these fools at the Landjuweel of 1561, see Hüsken 1996, pp. 112–45, esp. 113; for the Violieren fools, see also Brussels 1994, pp. 84–85, no. 178, color ill. 18. 72. Erasmus 1982–2006, 32:62–63 (I vi 95). For this proverb in the Middle Ages, see Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the Medieval Academy of America, 1987), pp. 65–66.

notes to pages 35–37

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73. Kamper spreekwoorden 1959, p. 52, line 15, Hy laet den Geck wt der mouwe kijcken (He lets the fool peek out of the sleeve), and line 16, Hy en can den Geck in der mouwen niet holden (He cannot hold the fool in the sleeves). For this proverb, see also Gibson 2006, p. 115 and n. 62; possible variants in De Laet 1962, no. 15: “He has it still in his sleeve and does not let it show”; and, less certainly, no. 116, “What does not go into the body, goes into the sleeve.” 74. Jan Janz Starter, Friesch Lust-Hof (Amsterdam: Paulus van Ravensteyn, 1621; Amsterdam: N. V. Buijten en Schipperheijn, 1974), p. 277, line 308. 75. For further examples of rederijker fools acting out proverbial and other verbal expressions, see Coigneau 1980–83, 3:605–8. 76. However, for some proverbs depicted by Maerten van Heemskerck for prints, see Veldman 1977, pp. 43–51. Heemskerck’s Cycle of Human Vicissitudes, a set of eight allegorical drawings, published as prints by Hieronymus Cock in 1564, was probably inspired by a series of floats in an Antwerp procession of 1561 (ibid., pp. 133–41), but the theme also occurs as a proverb in Goedthals 1568, pp. 131–32. See also Sheila Williams and Jean Jacquot, “Ommegangs anversois du temps de Bruegel et de Van Heemskerck,” in Les fêtes de la Renaissance, ed. Jean Jacquot, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche ­Scientifique, 1956–60), 2:358–88, esp. 362–63. 7 7. Some of these are discussed in Gibson 1992b. 78. See Riggs 1977. 79. A. J. J. Delen, Oude Vlaamsche graphiek: Verzamelde opstellen (Antwerp: Het Kompas, 1943), pp. 131, 134. For the print, see also Lebeer 1939–40, esp. pp. 196– 98, nos. 1–21. The print was done on two plates, and earlier scholars, includ­ ing Lebeer, knew only the right half. A complete impression of both plates was acquired by the Brussels print room in 1971; see Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier, Cinq années d’acquisitions, 1969–1973, 1975, pp. 394–96, no. 189, ill. p. 399. 8 0. Writers differ on the number of proverbs that Bruegel depicted; Grosshans 2003, p. 130, identifies 126 proverbs in the picture. 81. Woordenboek 1882–1998, s.v. “Abuis” and “Abuis (Suppl.).” A similar range of meanings can be found in the contemporary French cognate abus; see Edmond Huguet, Dictionnaire de la langue française du seizième siècle, 7 vols. (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Édouard Champion, 1925–73), 1:23–24, s.v. “Abus.” A referein by Jan van Doesborch begins “The course of the world is an abuys / the one sings, ­a nother laughs, the third weeps,” and goes on to list Caesar, Samson, Troilus, and others who have been deceived, often at the cost of their lives; see Van Doesborch-Kruyskamp 1940, 2:169–71, no. xci. 82. This is much the meaning given in David 1606, no. 119, who speaks of those who practice the deceits of the blue cloak as neither honorable, wise, or good, and having no fear of God. For the metaphorical significance of cloaks and hoods in general, see Sarah Stanbury Smith, “ ‘Game in Myn Hood’: The Traditions of a Comic Proverb,” Studies in Iconography 9 (1983): 1–12. 8 3. Het handschrift-Van Hulthem. Hs. Brussel, Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België, 15.589– 623, ed. Herman Brinkman and Janny Schenkel, Middeleeuwse Verzamelhand­

174

84. 85.

86. 7. 8 88. 9. 8 9 0.

notes to pages 37–39

schriften uit de Neder­landen 7, 2 vols. (Hilversum: Verloren, 1999), 2:1220, lines 24–47. Ordinantie 1563, fol. 1r. The complete text of the Ordinantie is reprinted in De Keyser 1939–40, pp. 134–37; the passage cited here on p. 134. For this ­pro­cession, see also Gibson 1981, pp. 438–40. Walter W. Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (1879–82; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 276, s.v. “Hood”: hoodwink, literally: “to make one wink or close his eyes, by covering him with a hood.” A similar expression may have inspired a print by the fifteenth-century German engraver known as the Master of the Gardens of Love, depicting a devil slipping a cloak over a man; see Hollstein 1954–, 12:199, where the man is identified, for no apparent ­reason, as “Judas Iscariot.” For the various meanings of the Blue Cloak, see Grauls 1957, pp. 89–90; De Bruyn 2001, pp. 83–85, 424–25; Mori 2004. Goedthals 1568, p. 22: “Al omme is bedrogh in. Par tout y a decevance.” Woordenboek 1882 –1998, s.v. “Abuis (Supp.)”: section 3. Conversely, in Lambrecht 1945, p. 32, bedrogh, another word for deceit, is translated by the two French words dol, meaning “strange” or “laughable,” and abuz, meaning “deceit.” Meadow 2002, pp. 132–33. Erasmus 1982–2006, CWE 34:14 (II vii 23).

chapter three. from hay to turnips Epigraph: Prov. Comm. 1947, pp. 82, 83, 235, no. 505, and pp. 44, 45, 127, no. 66 respectively; the first proverb repeated in Goedthals 1568, p. 90: Die meest grabt / meest heeft. 1. See esp. Bax 1949; Bax 1979; Bax 1956. 2. For various interpretations, see Otto Benesch, “Der Wald der sieht und hört,” Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 58 (1937): 258–66, reprinted in idem, Collected Writings, ed. Eva Benesch, vol. 2 (London: Phaidon, 1971), 279–85; ­Vandenbroeck 1981, pp. 178–87; Vandenbroeck 2002, pp. 110–14; Silver 2006, p. 280. This proverb, of course, does not explain the other elements in the drawing, neither the three birds that perch in the branches of tree and the fox and hen at its foot, nor the Latin inscription at the top of the sheet. These lines were apparently added after the drawing was completed and may be read as “serrimi quippe est ingenii semper uti inventis et numquam inveniendis,” that is, “It is a poor spirit which works only with the inventions of others, and is ­u nable to bring forth its own ideas”; see Roger H. Marijnissen and Peter Ruyffelaere, Hieronymus Bosch: The Complete Works (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1987), p. 455. 3. De Laet 1962, p. 33, no. 547: Le champ a yeulx et le bois a oreilles. Tvelt heeft ooghen ende dbosch heeft ooren; Kamper spreekwoorden 1959, p. 60, line 16: tVelt heft ogen / tWolt heft oren. It also occurs in Goedthals 1568 (cited in Vandenbroeck 1981, p. 184). 4. J. B. F. Van Gils, “ ‘Dat velt heft ogen, dat wolt heft oren’: Een houtsnede uit de 16de eeuw,” Maanblad voor beeldende kunsten 20 (1943): 208–11. Alexander ­Porteous

notes to pages 39–43

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

175

cites a medieval Latin version of this proverb: Aures sunt nemoris, oculi campestribus oris; see Porteous, The Forest in Folklore and Mythology (New York: MacMillan, 1928; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002), p. 12. For previous literature on the Haywain, see Walter S. Gibson, Hieronymus Bosch: An Annotated Bibliography (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), pp. 97–100, nos. E146– E160 and the index of works, s.v. “Haywain triptych”; more recently Silver 2006, pp. 260–73. The most detailed iconographic studies of the Haywain and its influence are Vandenbroeck 1984; Vandenbroeck1987b; De Bruyn 2001. See also Marina Warner, “Ángeles y máquinas: El destino de los seguidores del carro de heno,” in El Bosco y la tradicíon pictórica de lo fantástico (Madrid: Fundación Amigos del Museo del Prado, 2006), pp. 341–37. Two essential earlier studies are De Keyser 1939–40; Grauls 1939–40. Snyder 1973, p. 38. All biblical passages are cited from the Douay-Rheims version. Henry 1985, 1:174, lines 7247–48. Jan van den Dale, Gekende werken met inleiding, bronnenstudie, aanteekeningen en ­glossarium, ed. Gilbert Degroote, Uitgave van de Vereeniging der Antwerpsche Biblio­ phielen, 2nd ser., no. 2 (Antwerp: De Nederlandsche Boekhandel; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1944), p. 102, lines 744–47, and p. 111, line 982. A comparable sentiment is expressed in an anonymous painting, Emperor Augustus and the Tibertine Sybil, done in Bruges ca. 1500 (Antwerp, Museum Mayer van den Bergh). The reverse depicts a human skull in a niche, below which is the inscription “My days have passed away like mist and smoke and my limbs are withered and my flesh has decayed like hoij” [hay]; see Vandenbroeck 1987b, pp. 123–24 and fig. 11. A similar proverb, Flos cinis (A flower is but ash), is recorded by Erasmus 1982– 2006, 36:287 (IV vi 12), who cites Isaiah 40:6. Ambrosio de Morales, “Tabla de Cebes,” 1586; see Snyder 1973, p. 32. See Vandenbroeck 1987b, pp. 118–26, for the use of hay as a vanitas symbol in later medieval and Renaissance literature. For its use in general, see the valuable list in De Bruyn 2001, pp. 460–64, s.v. “Hooi,” to which may be added David 1606, no. 191. For comparable proverbs in other languages, see, e.g., Hassel 1982, p. 129, no. G46, s.v. “le grain et la paille”; Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Collection of the Proverbs Found in English Literature and the Dictionaries of the Period (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950), p. 636, no. S918, s.v. “straw.” Andriessoon 2003, pp. 130, 237, no. 73.3. Cf. a related proverb, Soo grof als bonen stroo (As rough and crass as dry beanstalks, literally bean straw), said of stupid people and things of no use (Wesseling 2002, p. 99). Both Andriessoon (ibid.) and Kamper spreekwoorden 1959, p. 3, nos. 8, 9, and p. 4, no. 5, list similar proverbs such as “He is not worth an oil seed,” “a rotten pear,” etc. For similar citations, see Suringer 1873, pp. 244–45 (section cxxxv), with a reference to Erasmus (1982–2006, 35:482–83 [IV i 66]: “Not worth a tiddler”). De Laet 1962, p. 40, no. 666: Die quaet doet, wint eenen wagon souts. Die wel doet, wint eenen waghen hoys. Het Geraardsbergse handschrift: Hs. Brussel, Koninklijke Bibliotheek Albert I, 837–845, ed.

176

1 4. 15.

16.

17. 18.

1 9. 20.

21.

22.

23.

notes to pages 43–45

by Marie-José Govers et al., Middeleeuwse Verzamelhandschriften uit de Nederlanden 1 (Hil­versum: Verloren, 1994), pp. 77, 79, no. 58; the quotation from p. 79, lines 3–4. For the date of the manuscript, see ibid., pp. 13–14. Herman Pleij, Het gilde van de Blauwe Schuit: Literatuur, volksfeesten en burgermoraal in de late middeleeuwen (Amsterdam: Muelenhof, 1979), pp. 189–97. Victor Massena Prince d’Essling and Eugène Müntz, Petrarque: Ses études d’art, son influence sur les artistes, ses portraits et ceux de Laura, l’illustration de ses écrits (Paris: Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1902), pp. 206–20. Petrarch’s Triumphs decorated the windows of the great dining room in the house of Hieronymus Buysley­ den (d. 1517); see D. Roggen and E. Dhanens, “De humanist Busleyden en de oorsprong van het Italianisme in de Nederlandse kunst,” Gentse bijdragen tot de kunstgeschiedenis 13 (1951): 145–46. The Triumphs were also depicted in several ­series of north French tapestries of the early sixteenth century; see Heinrich Göbel, Tapestries of the Lowlands, trans. Robert West (1924; New York: Hacker Art Books, 1974), pls. 72, 74, 76, 77. Henry 1985–88, 2:121–28, lines 5052–345; see also pp. xxi–xxii for a summary of this episode. Avarice is so depicted in a fourteenth-century manuscript of the Pèlerinage (Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Genviève, MS 1130); see Paule Amblard, Le Pèlerinage de vie humaine: Le songe très chrétien de l’abbé Guillaume de Digulleville (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), p. 111. For detailed discussions of these foreground figures in the central panel of the Haywain, see Vandenbroeck 2002, pp. 64–70; Silver 2006, pp. 264–70. “An ABC on the State of the Evil World,” in Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS IV 421; see Kathryn M. Rudy, “An Illustrated Mid-Fifteenth-Century Primer for a Flemish Girl: British Library, Harley MS 3828,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 69 (2006): 51–94, esp. 74, Wrecheit heeft menighe ziele verloren. See, e.g., Gibson 1973, pp. 72–73; Vandenbroeck 1987b, pp. 133–40. For the group on top of the haywain, see Yona Pinson, “Hieronymus Bosch: Marginal Imagery Shifted into the Center and the Notion of Upside Down,” in The Metamorphosis of Marginal Images: From Antiquity to Present Time, ed. Nurith Kenaan-Kedar and Asher Ovadiah (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2001), pp. 203– 12, esp. 205. Speculum Christiani: A Middle English Religious Treatise of the 14th Century, ed. Gustaf Holmstedt, Early English Text Society, Original Series 182 (Oxford: ­Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 66, lines 10–13. The association of Lust and Avarice was traditional; see Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Mediaeval Art from Early Christian Times to the Thirteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1964), p. 58. Cf. Mark 8:36: “For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?”; Mark, 8:37: “Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”; and Luke 9:25: “For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, and cast away himself?” Vienna, Akademie der bildende Künste, Das Weltgerichtstriptychon von Hieronymus Bosch (Vienna: Verlag Kremayr und Scheriau for Rosenheimer Verlagshaus ­A lfred Förg, Rosenheim, 1988), p. 38.

notes to pages 45–46

177

2 4. For the blue devil, see De Bruyn 2001, pp. 83–85. The “music of the flesh” is discussed in Walter S. Gibson, “The Garden of Earthly Delights of Hieronymus ­Bosch: The Iconography of the Central Panel,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 24 (1973): 1–26, esp. 19–20, with further references. The lute played by the young man in white also had erotic connotations, for which see Carla Zecher, Sounding Objects: Musical Instruments, Poetry, and Art in Renaissance France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), pp. 139–46, who notes (p. 140) that the Netherlandish word for lute, luit, also signified the vagina. My thanks to Barbara C. Bowen for this reference. Finally, the angel and the serenading devil flanking the lovers probably reflect the good and evil angels thought to accompany each person throughout life, the subject of a German woodcut of 1470–80 (Gibson 1973, p. 105 and fig. 87); see Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. János M. Bak and Paul A. Hollingsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1990), p. 186. 25. Grauls 1938, pp. 157–60. 26. Pierre J. Payer, The Bridling of Desire: Views of Sex in the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), p. 26. 27. See Howard Rollin Patch, The Other World According to Descriptions in Medieval ­Literature (New York: Octagon Books, 1970), index, s.v. “tower.” Towers of Hell appear, e.g., in John Plummer, The Hours of Catherine of Cleves (New York: George Braziller, ca. 1966), no. 99. 28. See also 2 Corinthians 5:1: “For we know, if our earthly house of habitation be dissolved, that we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in heaven.” 29. Cf. Ephesians 2:11–22, on the construction of the Universal Church with the blocks (bricks) of the faithful, discussed by Peter Lowe, “ ‘ You Who Were Once Far Off ’: Enlivening Scripture in the Main Portal at Vézelay,” Art Bulletin 85, no. 3 (September 2003): 469–89, esp. 479–81. For St. Gregory’s claim that the living on earth, by their good deeds, built their mansions in heaven, see John J. Contreni, “ ‘Building Mansions in Heaven’: The Visio Baroni, Archangel Raphael, and a Carolingian King,” Speculum 78, no. 3 (July 2003): 673–706. For Augus­ tine, the blessed themselves become the “living stones”; see St. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 1998, p. 351 (Book 8, 24). According to Honorius of Autun, Christ will institute the temple in the Heavenly Jerusalem with “living jewels, that is, the elect”; see E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christian­ity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), p. 70. Finally, William Durandus speaks of the “Holy Church which is built in heaven of ­living stones”; see Durandus, The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments: A Translation of the First Book of the Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, trans. and ed. John Mason Neale and Benjamin Webb (London: Gibbings and Company, 1906), p. 14. 30. This interpretation was first advanced in Gibson 1973, pp. 73–77; see also De Bruyn 2001, pp. 154–56. 31. Snyder 1973, p. 39. A comic variation of this theme occurs in a poem by Hans

178

32.

33.

3 4.

35.

3 6. 37. 38.

39.

notes to pages 46–49

Sachs describing how the Devil comes to earth to recruit masons and ­carpenters to enlarge hell for the increased influx of Christian souls; Sachs 1966, 2:152–59: Vom dem Teufel dem die Hell will zu eng werden. Although not yet subjected to dendrochronological study, the Escorial Haywain is generally considered a copy done ca. 1550 (Garrido and Van Schoute 2001, pp. 218–19); see also Frédéric Elsig, Jheronimus Bosch: La question de la chronologie (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2004), p. 32. Since a dendrochronological analysis establishes that the panels forming its support came from a tree felled no earlier than 1508, the Prado Haywain is ­assumed have been painted not many years before Bosch’s death in 1516. See Garrido and Van Schoute 2001, pp. 120–57. However, the triptych is assigned to a collaborator of Bosch by Fritz Koreny, “Hieronymus Bosch: Überlegungen zu Stil und Chronologie; Prolegomena zu einer Sichtung des Oeuvres,” Jahrbuch Wien 4–5 (2002–3): 47–76, English summary, 73–75; see esp. p. 54. For the theme of the pilgrimage of life in Bosch’s work, see Gibson, 1973, pp. 101–9. Developing an earlier suggestion by R. H. Marijnissen, Eric De Bruyn proposes that the figure is a peddler personifying a repentant sinner; see the survey of the Prado wings and the thematically related picture in the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam; see De Bruyn 2001, pp. 165–413, in his survey of earlier interpretations of these pictures. See also Eric de Bruyn, “Hieronymus Bosch’s So-Called Prodigal Son Tondo: The Pedlar as a Re­ pentant Sinner,” in Koldeweij et al. 2001, pp. 133–43. Van Waadenoijen 2007, pp. 194–209, esp. 197, identifies the Prado figure as the poor man who goes through this world, ignoring its goods and pleasures in the hope of gaining heaven, as opposed to the crowd in the central panel. Steppe 1967, p. 14. It has been supposed that Felipe de Guevara acquired the painting from his father, Diego de Guevara, but Steppe discounts this pos­ sibility, noting that after Diego’s death in 1520, some of his goods were sold at open auction. For this and other paintings listed in Spanish royal inventories as by Bosch, see Paul Vandenbroeck, “The Spanish inventarios reales and ­Hieronymus Bosch,” in Koldeweij et al. 2001, pp. 49–63; Garrido and Van Schoute 2001, p. 123. Steppe 1967, p. 14. This point is well made by Van Waadenoijen 2007, pp. 207–8. The work seems to have been commissioned by the regents of the Holy Ghost Hospital at Alkmaar for the church; see Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, ­Middeleeuwse kunst der Noordelijke Nederlanden, 1958, p. 90, no. 87. For a later-sixteenth-century reference, see C. J. de Bruyn Kops, “De Zeven Werken van Barmhartigheid van de Meester von Alkmaar gerestaureerd,” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum Amsterdam 23 (1975): 203–26, esp. 222, English summary, pp. 249–51. For the presence of this work in Hendrik’s palace at Brussels, see Steppe 1967, pp. 8–11; Ernst H. Gombrich, “The Earliest Description of Bosch’s Garden of Delight,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967): 403–6; ­reprinted in idem, The Heritage of Apelles: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), pp. 79–82.

notes to pages 49–51

179

40. J. K. Steppe, “Mencia de Mendoza et ses relations avec Érasme, Gilles de ­Busleyden et Jean-Louis Vivès,” in Scrinium Erasmianum, ed. J. Coppens, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969), 2:449–506. 4 1. Ibid., pp. 455, 492. For Mencia’s protection of Gossaert, see J. K. Steppe, “La date de décès de Jean Gossaert,” in Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van ­Beuningen; and Bruges, Groeningemusum, Jan Gossaert genaamd Mabuse, 1965, cat. by H. Pauwels, H. R. Hoetink, and S. Herzog, pp. 33–38. 4 2. Pilar Silva Maroto, “Bosch in Spain: On the Works Recorded in the Royal Inventories,” in Koldeweij et al. 2001, p. 43. The three paintings were a canvas of “An old man and woman,” a “Tower of Babylon,” and a “St. John the Evan­ gelist holding a chalice in his hand.” None can be connected with surviving works by Bosch. A fourth painting in this list, described as “A Wedding where they are eating and some madmen are dancing,” is generally assumed to be by or after Bosch, but it sounds more like one of the “grotesque banquets” ascribed to Jan Verbeeck; see Gibson 1992a. 4 3. Steppe 1967, pp. 13–14. 4 4. Sophie Schneebalg-Perelman, “Richesses du garde-meuble parisien de François Ier,” Gazette des beaux-arts, 6e pér., 78 (November 1971): 253–304, esp. 289–90: “Cinq pièces de tappicerie de diverses histoires rehaulsé d’or d’argent et soye des devys de Hieronyme.” See also Cox-Rearick 1996, pp. 367, inventory of 1542, no. 28. 45. The cartoons remained for some years in Brussels, where they served for the production of further tapestries, including a set for Francis I himself; see Victoria and Albert Museum, The Raphael Cartoons, intro. John Pope-Hennessy (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1958), pp. 5–6. 46. For the tapestries secured by Francis through Vezeleer, see Cox-Rearick 1996, pp. 367–68. Vezeleer’s dealings with the French court are briefly discussed in Vermeylen 2003, pp. 63–64. Francis also acquired ­Netherlandish paintings, many from Antwerp, among them, incidentally, a Fantosmes de sainct Antoine (phantasms of St. Anthony), most likely a Temptation of St. Anthony, either by Bosch or in his style; see Jean Adhémar, “French Sixteenth Century Genre Paintings,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 8 (1945): 191–95, esp. 191. 47. Steppe 1967, p. 40 n. 153: “Une tenture de tapisserie de laine . . . , fabrique de Bruxelles, dessein du vieux Brugle, representant Les visions de saint Anthoine, dans une bordure d’architecture soustenue par des pilastres avec des festons des fleurs et de fruits . . . en cinq pieces doublées de toile.” 4 8. Ibid., p. 40 n. 154. Félibien mentions only une tenture de tapisserie after Bosch, but Steppe, probably correctly, connects it with the series of Francis I. 49. Kurz 1967, p. 151; for various correspondence relating to these tapestries, see Maurice Piquard, “Le Cardinal de Granvelle, les artistes et les écrivains,”­ Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art 17 (1947–48): 113–47, esp. 137–39; idem, “Le Cardinal de Granvelle, amateur de tapiesseries,” Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art 19 (1950): 111–26, esp. 119–21. It is generally assumed that the Bosch series were among the new tapestries mentioned by Morillon, but as

180

5 0. 51.

52.

53.

5 4.

55. 5 6. 57.

5 8.

notes to pages 51–53

Vandenbroeck 2001, p. 88 and n. 4, convincingly argues, Morillon distinguishes between the “new tapestries,” subjects unknown, and those “de Bosche.” Kurz 1967, p. 151. In a letter of 5 October 1567 Granvelle was informed by his private secretary that Alva wanted copies made after his Bosch tapestries but had been told that a cartoon could be made after the original painting in the collection of William of Orange. Shortly thereafter, Alva had William indicted for various “crimes,” and his possessions in Brussels confiscated (Vandenbroeck 2001, p. 88). The composition of the Elephant tapestry, however, may be reflected in a print published by Hieronymus Cock, the so-called Besieged Elephant, inscribed “Hieronymus Bos Inve.” (Hieronymus Bosch inventor); see Lafond-Gilchrist 2002, pp. 97–99, no. 25. A close variant of the same subject was engraved by Alart du Hameel, often thought to be after an original by Bosch himself (ibid., pp. 59–60, no. 6). Some scholars assume that the tapestries now in the Patrimonio Nacional are the ones owned by Granvelle; see Guy Delmarcel, “Le Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle et la tapisserie: État de la question et nouvelles données,” in Les Granvelles et les anciens Pay-Bas, ed. Krista De Jong and Gustaaf Janssens, Symbolae, series B, vol. 17 (Leuven: Universitaire Pers, 2000), pp. 279– 92, esp. 286–87. On the other hand, it has been argued that Granvelle’s Bosch series were inherited by his nephew, Francis, count of Cantecroy, who sold them to Emperor Rudolf II in 1600 (Kurz 1967, pp. 151–52). Furthermore, as the Spanish series lack Granvelle’s coat of arms, it is often assumed, without further proof, that these are the set ordered by Alva. For the subjects of these tapestries, see Kurz 1967, pp. 153, 156–60; MalinesMunich-Amsterdam 1993, pp. 92–113. Steppe 1967, p. 34, identifies the “St. Martin” tapestry as St. Anthonius trekt naar de eenzamheid, that is, “St. Anthony Leaving for the Solitude (i.e., the wilderness),” a subject that, to my knowledge, is without precedent in earlier art. See Kurz 1967 pp. 153–56; for good color illustrations of the whole tapestry and some details, see Malines-Munich-Amsterdam 1993, pp. 107–12. Steppe 1967, p. 33. Cf. Vandenbroeck 1987b, pp. 135–37, who also notes that the veneration of relics was satirized even before the Reformation. Jones 2002, pp. 255, 278–79, discusses the mock relics carried in Protestant processions. In a satire published at Antwerp ca. 1500, a woodcut shows an altar bearing a shrine dedicated to St. Lorts, “St. Deceit” (Kavaler 1999, pp. 206 and 207, fig. 117; also Van Gelder 1911, pp. 201–7); Andriessoon 2003, pp. 100, 207, no. 43.3, cites a proverb, “To burn a candle to St. Lorts,” which he explains is said of those who buy on credit without intending to pay. The “sea of this world” is a topic I plan to address at length on another occasion, but in the meantime, see Timothy Kircher, “The Sea as an Image of ­Temporality among Tuscan Dominicans and Humanists in the Fourteenth Century,” in Time and Eternity: The Medieval Discourse, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and

notes to pages 54–58

59. 60. 1. 6 62. 63.

6 4. 65.

66. 67. 8. 6 69.

7 0. 7 1.

181

Gerson Moreno-Riaño, International Medieval Research, vol. 9 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 283–94. See Unverfehrt 1980, no. 33 and figs. 31–33 (Valencia triptych); and nos. 55a–b, figs. 53, 54 (Stone of Folly); see also no. 21a and fig. 56 for similar grisaille frames on copies of the Conjuror, and no. 62, fig. 227 (Seven Deadly Sins). The Prado St. Anthony is now judged to be an original work by Bosch, with a number of later changes, including the alteration of the original semicircular top into a rectangular format; see Garrido and Van Schoute 2001, pp. 58–67. See Lafond-Gilchrist 2002, pp. 53–54, no. 3. See Unverfehrt 1980, for examples. Ekkehard Mai, “Der ‘Heuwagen’: Mostaert im Kontext von Bosch und Bruegel,” in Gillis Mostaert (1528–1598): Ein Antwerpener Maler zur Zeit der Bruegel-Dynastie, ed. Ekkehard Mai (Wolfhausen: Edition Minerva Hermann Farnung, 2005), pp. 126–41. Utrecht, Rijksmuseum Het Catharijneconvent, inv. no. RMCC s.44; see Utrecht 1981, pp. 14–19. An inventory made ca. 1600 of the contents of the castle of the duke of Croy (now Arenberg Castle), near Louvain, lists a painting on linen “made by Jeronimo Bosch,” depicting a great hay cart attended by a crowd of people and a cleric kissing a reliquary (Steppe 1967, p. 23, no. 3, and p. 33). This last detail recalls the reliquary in the tapestry design and the two paintings associated with Mostaert, but in none of these compositions does a cleric venerate it in this fashion. A hoywaghen (hay wagon) on linen, apparently with a pendant showing the Temptation of St. Anthony, is listed among the paintings owned by Jean Noirot in 1572, but no artist is named (Smolderen 1995, p. 39). Lebeer 1939–40, pp. 152–55; De Bruyn 2001, p. 53; see also Grauls 1938, pp. 161– 69, for a transcription of the inscriptions on the print and a discussion of its iconography. For Hogenberg’s print, see Hollstein 1949–, 9:50, no. 2, not ill. For the prodigal son and related themes in sixteenth-century Netherlands, see Konrad Renger, Lockere Gesellschaft: Zur Ikonographie des Verlorenen Sohnes und von Wirtshausszenen in der niederländischen Malerei (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1970); Barbara Haeger, “The Prodigal Son in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century ­Netherlandish Art: Depictions of the Parable and the Evolution of a Catholic Image,” Simiolus 16, nos. 2–3 (1986): 128–38; Christine Megan Armstrong, The Moralizing Prints of Cornelis Anthonisz (Princeton: Princeton Uni­versity Press, 1990), pp. 19–34. Ordinantie 1563, fol. A1. Ibid., fol. A4; see also De Keyser 1939–40, p. 134; Vandenbroeck 1987b, pp. 111–12; De Bruyn 2001, pp. 54–55. The English paraphrase given in Ludwig von Baldass obscures the sense of the last verse; see Baldass, Bosch (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1969), p. 223, where the last line, “Maer int eynde ist al Hoy” (But in the end it is only hay), is rendered as “but hay’s a stuff that will not last.”

182

notes to pages 58–60

72. See Gibson 1979b, for an extended discussion; also Marijnissen and Seidel 1969, p. 25; Unverfehrt 1984, pp. 237–38 and 237, fig. 29, where he dates it ca. 1580; Vandenbroeck 1987b, pp. 129–32; De Bruyn 2001, p. 53. 73. For the distaff as a common symbol of women, see Woordenboek 1882–1998, 14:2846, s.v. “Spinrokken.” 74. This is one of the meanings of the expression kwaad garen spinnen; see ibid., 4:291, s.v. “Garen.” For similar connotations of spinning, see Stewart 2003, pp. 130, 137–38. In a sixteenth-century referein, a wife accused of adultery protests that she has not spun “a bad thread”; see Stijevoort 1930, 2:195, referein ccxxxii, lines 17–19; cited by Leo Wuyts, “Joachim Beuckelaers Groentenmarkt van 1567: Een iconologische bijdrag,” in Ghent 1986–87, p. 37 n. 82. 75. “Not worth a withered neep [turnip]” and in Old French, Ne pas valoir un naveau [navet]; see Ziolkowski 2007, pp. 182–83. 76. For the relevant meanings of the word rapen, see Woordenboek 1882–1998, s.v. “Rapen I,” with several sixteenth-century citations. See also P. J. Harrebomée, Spreekwoorden der Nederlandsche taal (Utrecht, 1858), 1:453 and 3:268–69: Rapen is en edel kruid, heel de wereld is op rapen uit, which may be translated “Turnips [rapen] are a noble vegetable, the whole world is out to scrounge” [rapen]. Derived from rapen is Rapiamus, the personification of any greedy, thieving character; see Karel van Mander, Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const, trans. and ed. Hessel Miedema, 2 vols. (Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker en Gumbert, 1973), 2:388–89, no. I 46f–g. But according to Van Mander (1:86–87, verse 46), the artist should be like Rapiamus and steal (i.e., copy) from other artists, because “well-cooked turnips is good soup” [Wel ghekoockte rapen is goe potage]. The word raap is derived from the Latin word for turnip, râpa, rapum, and the play on words noted here occurs at least by the seventh century. Cf. Isidore of Seville 2006, p. 355, 17.9.7: “the turnip (rapa) is so named from ‘seizing’ (rapere), that is, ‘taking root’ (comprehendere, also meaning ‘to seize’).” 7 7. Cf. “the best vegetable in the world is sage,” a medieval play on the word selve, meaning both the herb “sage” and “money”; see Hogenelst 1997, 2:116–17, no. 156; cf. Andriessoon 2003, no. 57.1, pp. 114, 221, no. 57.1, with a variant noted in Gheurtz’s manuscript proverb collection, fol. 29v, and repeated in Kamper spreekwoorden 1959, p. 5, no. 23: Selve is guedt cruyt, mer sy wasset in all mans hoeven niet (Sage is a good herb, but it does not grow in every man’s garden). 78. Aelwarich, for 1528; see Van Kampen et al. 1980, p. 117, lines 147–49. 79. Sorgheloos, for ca. 1540; see ibid., p. 121, lines 7–8, and p. 135, lines 80–84. For several other examples of the rapen motif, see ibid., pp. 177, lines 153–55, and 199, lines 123–25. See also Vandenbroeck 1987b, p. 131. 8 0. Stijevoort 1930, 2:59–61, refereijn clxiv; reprinted in Vandenbroeck 1987b, pp. 129–31. 81. Although turnips were consumed by all classes of society, they were considered from antiquity on as preeminently the food of the lower orders; cf. Van Kampen et al. 1980, p. 176 note for line 155; and Ziolkowski 2007, pp. 181– 84, who notes (p. 183) the medieval German proverb: “Let the lowborn dig turnips.” See also the informative entry in Waverley Root, Food: An ­Authoritative,

notes to pages 61–62

82.

83.

84. 85.

86.

87.

8. 8 89.

183

Visual History and Dictionary on the Foods of the World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), pp. 542–47, s.v. “Turnip.” A similar allusion appears in a late medieval burlesque poem, in which one of the peasants engaging in a mock tournament “had his escutscheon made with two warmly roasted turnips” (Wittenwiler’s Ring 1969, p. 2). For some sixteenth-century turnip recipes, see Eenen Nyeuwen Coock Boeck: Kookboek samengesteld door Gheeraert Vorselman en gedrukt te Antwerpen in 1560, ed. Elly Cockx-Indestege (Wiesbaden: Guido Pressler, 1971), index, s.v. “Raap (Rape).” See Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Flämische Malerei van Jan van Eyck bis Bruegel d. Älter, 1981, pp. 153–56, with ill. Illuminating in this regard is the story of the peasant who, wishing to give the king a present, brought to court a large turnip, for which he was richly rewarded; see Nyeuwe clucht boeck 1983, pp. 205–6, no. 229, with other versions of this story in medieval and later literature in ­Ziolkowski 2007, pp. 164–99, 322–39. Gibson 1978, p. 679 and fig. 8. Turnips figure prominently in Sebald Beham’s woodcut of peasants socializing, The Spinning Bee, of ca. 1524; see Stewart 2003, p. 127, fig. 6.1, who notes (pp. 131, 133) that in two poems of 1546 and 1553 by the Nuremberg poet and playwright Hans Sachs dealing with spinning bees, turnip cutting is one of the rustic diversions on such occasions. A traditional symbol of gluttony, the pig could also symbolize the sin of avarice; see Morton W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins (N.p.: Michigan State ­University Press, 1952; repr. 1967), p. 246. F. C. van Boheemen and Th. C. J. van der Heijden, De Delftse rederijkers “Wy rapen gheneucht,” Serie-uitgave van het Genootschap Delfia Batavorum, no. 9 (Amster­ dam: Huis aan de Drie Grachten, 1982), see p. 29 for the motto and its meaning. I am grateful to Bien Vriesendorp for this reference. Pliny notes that this was the opinion of one Diocles; see Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, 10 vols. (London: William Heine­ mann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938–52), 6:12, 13 (20:9, lines 20–22); Der vrouwen natuere 1980, fol. 5r; see also Ethan Matt Kavaler, “Erotische elementen in de markttaferelen van Beuckelaer, Aertsen, en hun ­tijdgenoten,” in Ghent 1986–87, p. 20. Stijevoort 1930, 2:60, refereijn clxiv, line 42: Want sy die sieck is inde borse ghenesen. For borse, or “purse,” as signifying the male testicles, see D. Th. Enklaar, Varende luyden: Studiën over de middeleeuwsche groepen van onmaatschappelijken in de Nederlanden, Van Gorcum’s Historische Bibliotheek, vol. 12 (Assen: Van Gorcum en Comp., 1937), pp. 22–23. In a refereyn int zotte of 1525 by Anna Bijns (summarized in Coigneau 1980–83, 2:310–11), a convent sister suddenly and violently lets wind and excuses herself on the grounds that she has eaten turnips. She is later ­addressed by a companion as a vuile bruydt, or “dirty bride,” i.e., a pregnant woman (Gibson 2006, p. 121 and n. 83), thus suggesting the nature of the “vegetable” she has ingested. Bax 1956, p. 121, with further references. For the symbolism of the bagpipe, see Jones 2002, pp. 269–70; Gibson 2006, pp. 91–92; the erotic associations of music and musical are discussed in D. W.

184

notes to pages 62–69

Robertson Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: ­Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 128–33. 9 0. For literature on Remigius Hogenberg, see Hollstein 1949–, 10:65. 91. Only Latin and Italian offer possibilities for punning on these two words. For the Latin, see n. 76 above; in Italian, we find rapa (turnip) and rapina (robbery, rapine) and the verbs rapinare (to rob) and rapire (to carry off, to steal by force, to ravish, etc.). However, I am not familiar with any Italian proverbs that play on these two words. 92. Vandenbroeck 1984, p. 60, there dated ca. 1550, and figs. 9–11. 93. Ibid., also mentions the poem in this connection. 94. I owe this reading of the inscription to ibid., p. 60. It could be the beginning of confuselijc, “confused, muddled”; or confusen, “to shame,” “to put to shame”, confusie, “shameful,” “defamatory”; or confusie, “shameful.” For these and other possible meanings, see Verdam ca. 1932, p. 303. 95. Otto Benesch, Die Zeichnungen der niederländischen Schulen des XV. und XVI. ­Jahrhunderts, Beschreibender Katalog der Handzeichnungen in der Graphische Sammlung Albertina 2 (Vienna, 1928), pp. 16–17, no. 108; Vandenbroeck 1987b, pp. 126– 27; Gibson 1992b, pp. 75–76. 96. I have emended Benesch’s reading of the inscription, for which I am indebted to the late Conrad H. Rawski for his valuable assistance. 97. Haverkamp Begemann 1969; Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann and Anne-Marie S. Logan, European Drawings and Watercolors in the Yale University Art Gallery, 1500– 1900, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 1:271–72, no. 503, 2: pl. 260; Vandenbroeck 1987b, p. 126; Gibson 1992b, p. 76; Suzanne Boorsch and John Marciari, Master Drawings from the Yale University Art Gallery (New ­Haven: Yale University Art Gallery; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 78–80, no. 17. 98. Haverkamp Begemann 1969 suggests this in the case of the Pourbus drawing. 99. For painted-glass roundels, see New York 1995, esp. pp. 199–211 for Pourbus. 100. Ill. in Utrecht 1981, p. 19, fig. 9, there dated to the end of the sixteenth century. 101. For this print and its origins, see Rotterdam-New York 2001, pp. 140–42, nos. 38, 39; Orenstein and Sellinck 2006, pp. 66–69, no. 31. 102. For prints published by Hieronymus Cock and others giving Bosch as inventor or otherwise reflecting his style, see Lafond-Gilchrist 2002, pp. 107–32, nos. 30–48. 103. For individual prints and print series dedicated to Granvelle, see Riggs 1977, list nos. 93, 174, 178, 206, 207, 260. 104. For an authoritative account of the economy in sixteenth-century Antwerp, with reference to other parts of the Netherlands, see Van der Wee 1963. 105. See Everaert 1920, pp. 55–74 and 211–31 respectively; for the title of the latter play, see p. 593. Comparable social satire in Netherlandish drama is discussed in Van Gelder 1911, esp. pp. 241–48. This context allows us to appreciate the many paintings of tax and rent collectors and of the Calling of St. Matthew produced in the Netherlands in this period; see Georges Marlier, Erasme et la

notes to pages 69–71

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peinture flamande de son temps (Damme: Éditions du Musée van Maerlant, 1954), pp. 251–301. 106. For the economic crises in the Netherlands provinces, ca. 1551–87, see Van der Wee 107, 2:209–67. 107. Lauris Jansz, Een spel van sinnen beroedende Het Cooren (1565), ed. W. M. H. Hummelen and G. R. W. Dibbits (Zutphen: Thieme, 1985), pp. 4–30 for a good discussion of the play and its historical context. 108. Ibid., pp. 44–45, lines 208–30. 109. Kamper spreekwoorden 1959, p. 9, no. 15: Rijcdom en stopt ghien ghiericheyt; Goedthals 1568, p. 93: Veel hebbens en stopt gheen gierichheyt. 110. Accounts of this case appear in A. P. Monbalieu, “Bruegels ‘Schaatsenrijden bij de St.-Jorispoort te Antwerpen,’ de betekenis van het jaartaal 1553 en een ­a rchiefstuk,” Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, Jaarboek 1981, pp. 17– 30; and in greater detail in Claudia Edith Goldstein, “Keeping up Appearances: The Social Significance of Domestic Decoration in Antwerp, 1508–1600” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2003), pp. 143–58. Monballieu suggests that ­Bruegel’s drawing of 1558, Skating before St. Joris’s Gate, published as a print by Cock and falsely dated 1553 in the second state (Rotterdam-New York 2001, pp. 174– 76, no. 62), alludes to the crime of Van der Heyden, who died in 1549. 111. For Noirot’s picture collection and its auction, see Smolderen 1995. 112. Erasmus 1982–2006, 35:223–24 (III vii 13) and 31:305–7 (I iii 87) respectively. For the latter saying Erasmus quoted Ecclesiastes 10:19 and a host of classical authors. “Money is the soul of mortal man,” Erasmus tells us elsewhere, citing Hesiod; see ibid., 33:183 (II iii 89). 113. For the twenty-four questions submitted to the authorities for the Landjuweel, see Edward van Even, Het Landjuweel van Antwerpen in 1561 (Leuven: C.-J. Fonteyn, 1861), p. 44; the questions mentioned here are nos. xii., xiv, xxiv respectively. Others in a similar vein include nos. vi (Why is one so greedy for temporal things?), xiii (Can a greedy person ever be satisfied?), and xv (Why does wealth never quench avarice?). 114. Refereinen en andere gedichten uit de XVIe eeuw, verzameld en afgeschreven door Jan de Bruyne, ed. K. Ruelens, 2 vols. (Antwerp: P. Kockx, 1879), 1:97–100, no. xxii. Accord­ ing to a postscript to the poem, it received second prize in its category at the Landjuweel of 1561. 115. But see Sellink 2007, p. 88, who notes that even the biggest fish, stranded and gutted, loses all the smaller fish it has swallowed, showing that greed does not pay. 116. Lebeer 1969, pp. 136–37, no. 54. Lebeer dates the original drawing, now lost, ca. 1563. See also Ethan Matt Kavaler, “Pictorial Satire, Ironic Invention, and Ideological Conflict: Bruegel’s Battle between the Piggy Banks and Strong Boxes,” in De Jong et al. 1997, pp. 155– 79; Kavaler 1999, pp. 98–105, 109–10; Rotterdam-New York 2001, pp. 253–54, no. 115; Orenstein and Sellinck 2006, pp. 72–75, no. 33. 117. Lebeer 1969, pp. 77–81, no. 26. Gibson 1992b, p. 75; Gibson 2006, pp. 41–43; Kavaler 1999, pp. 76–98; Rotterdam-New York 2001, pp. 166–70, nos. 58, 59; Orenstein and Sellinck 2006, pp. 78–82, no. 34. 118. Andriessoon 2003, pp. 126, 233, no. 69.8; see also David 1606, no. 233: “To seek

186

notes to pages 71–75

the longest straw.” Cf. Prov. Comm. 1947, pp. 56, 57, 161, no. 198: “the weakest has the worse of the rope”; with variants in Erasmus 1982–2006, 31:444–45 (I v 67), and 34:307 (III iii 77). Cf. our expression “to get the short end of the stick” (Ammer 2006, p. 385). 119. Marijnissen and Seidel 1984, p. 41, no. 34. 120. For Nemo, see Gerta Calmann, “The Picture of Nobody: An Iconographical Study,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 (1960): 60–104. 121. Cf. Marcolphus who, in his exchange with Solomon, says “He despiseth a great gift that knoweth not himself ”; see Solomon and Marcolphus 1995, p. 151; Salomon ende Marcolphus 1941, p. 12. 122. See Gibson 1981, pp. 438–40. For the thematic relationship of Bruegel’s Elck draw­ ing to the Elck procession of 1563, see also Grauls 1939; Grauls 1957, pp. 175–86. 123. David 1606, no. 191. An unusual variant occurs in Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes: the woodcut shows a shock of ripe wheat with some broken stalks, ­accompanied by the motto Mihi pondera, luxus and by verses explaining that just as the heavy ears of wheat may break the stalk, so excessive wealth and luxury may corrupt our understanding; see Whitney 1967, facsimile p. 23. 124. For the various symbolic gifts presented in these plays, see Pikhaus 1988–89, 1:110–19, 2:542–44. 125. Hummelen 1968, no. 1 R 4; Pikhaus 1988–89, 1:170–71, 2:284, no. 64. 126. Hummelen 1968, no. 1 Q 1; Pikhaus 1988–89, 1:115–16, no. 60. For the text, see Paul de Keyser, Het onuitgegeven tafelspel van Al Hoy met Ijdel Lustken, Willeken Noyt Genoech en Buycxken Selden Sat, uit het Dedermonds handschrift, Gedenkschriften van de Oudheidkundige Kring van het Land van Dendermonde, Buitengewone uitgaven, nr. 20 (Dendermonde: A. De Cuyper-Robberecht, 1964). Cf. the play Coninck Balthasar, first performed at Hasselt in 1591, in which one of characters complains that his sack “is nothing more than hay; light as a flea: it is ‘Ydel Betrouwen’ ” (Vain Confidence); see Hummelen 1958, pp. 390–91; Hummelen 1968, p. 115, no. 1 S 1. 127. See Nalis 1998, 4:6–7, no. 842, with ill.; and a detailed study of this print in Vandenbroeck 1984, pp. 42–59 and figs. 2–8. 128. See Grauls 1938, pp. 161–68, for a verse-by-verse comparison of the inscriptions on the two prints by Hogenberg and Horenbault. For other examples of the Al Hoy allegory, see Vandenbroeck 1987b, pp. 126–27, nos. n and j, and n. 54; De Bruyn 2001, pp. 47–53. 129. See Hummelen 1968, no. 1 Z 3; Pikhaus 1989, 1: 224–25, 2: 539, no. 67. 130. Spreucken van / Swerel[t]s Misbruyck, / Diemen Noempt / De Blauwe Huyck; a good ill. in Mori 2004, p. 74, fig. 1. See also Jan Grauls, “Het spreekwoordenschilderij van Sebastian Vrancx,” Bulletin, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts 9 (1960): 107–64; for the turnip, see p. 148, no. 158, and ill. p. 149. For the attribution, see Brussels, Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België, Departement Oude Kunst, Inventariscatalogus van de oude schilderkunst, 1984, p. 321, inv. no. 3301; a color ill. in De Jongh 2006, pp. 12–13. 131. See Plokker 1984; Edwin Buijsen, “Sinne-cunst: Adriaen van de Vennes ­schilderijen met spreukbanden,” in Spreekwoorden 2006, pp. 32–39, with some

notes to pages 75–80

187

good color ills. Plokker, p. 15, suggests that Van de Venne used grisaille because he considered gray ( grauw) an appropriate medium for ridiculing the foibles of the mob (het grauw). As Buijsen notes (pp. 32, 37), however, Van de Venne also depicted other kinds of subject matter in grisaille and probably employed this technique as a means of producing paintings quickly and inexpensively. Buijsen is currently preparing a dissertation on the paintings of Adriaen van de Venne. 132. Plokker 1984, pp. 94–95, no. 32. My warm thanks to Edwin Buijsen for ­providing me with a photograph of this painting. 133. The two pictures are inscribed ’T is al om ’t hebben te doen (It all has to do with having, i.e., getting) and ’T will al raapen (i.e., They will all steal it); see Plokker 1984, pp. 144–45, no. 53, and pp. 244–45, no. 105 respectively. The locations of both are unknown, but Plokker characterizes the latter picture as “very weak.” The turnip seller and his eager customers also appear in the fourth ­panel, its inscription largely illegible, now in Oslo, National Museum (ibid., pp. 186–87, no. 73). 134. Ibid., pp. 98–100, no. 34. 135. See E. de Jongh, “Vermommingen van Vrouw Wereld in de 17de eeuw,” in Album amicorum J. G. van Gelder, ed. J. Bruyn, J. A. Emmens, E. de Jongh, and D. P. Snoep (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 198–206; reprinted in idem, Kwesties van betekenis: Thema en motief in de Nederlandse schilderkunst van de seventiende eeuw (Leiden: ­Primavera Pers, 1995), pp. 59–82. 136. The most famous example of this subject, of course, occurs in Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse woodcut series of 1493 (B. 73). 137. Noteworthy is an emblem in Daniel Cramer, Emblemata Sacra, Secunda Pars (Frankfurt am Main: Lucae Jennis, 1624), p. 85, emblem xviii. Bearing the motto Rapere capere, the image shows a man, his head enclosed in an imperial orb, who pulls a wagonload of hay from which tufts are plucked by five arms emerging from a cloud above. 138. Cornelis Udemans, Verkeerde Werelt (Middelburg: Pieter van Goetthem, 1660); see Van­denbroeck 1987b, pp. 127–28, for the image and accompanying poem.

chapter four. loquacious pictures Epigraph: “Loquax enim res est tacita pictura,” in Desiderius Erasmus, Christiani Matrimonii Instituto, Opera Omnia, ed. J. Leclerc, 10 vols. in 11 (Leiden: Petrus Vander Aa, 1703–6; repr. London: Gregg Press, 1962), 5: col. 696E, a passage I owe to Christopher S. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 149 and n. 59. 1. The literature is vast, but see Grauls 1957; Marijnissen and Seidel 1984; Mieder 2004b; Yoko Mori, Bryugeru no Kotowaza no Sekai [Pieter Bruegel: Proverbs and folk culture] (Tokyo: Hokuosah, 1992). 2. Lebeer 1969, nos. 65–76. Shorter descriptions of this series appear in Van Bastelaer-Gilchrist 1992, nos. 167–87; Mauquoy-Hendrickx 1978–82, 2:306–8, nos. 1683–89; Tokyo 1989, nos. 65–76; Devisscher and Denhaene 2006, pp. 204–17. Several of the proverbs are discussed in detail in Grauls 1957

188

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

notes to pages 80–86

and Grauls 1959. In the following discussion of these prints, I have used the English translations in Tokyo 1989 except where otherwise noted. For the career of Jan Wierix, see Mauquoy-Hendrickx 1978–82, 1:514–18; Carl Van de Velde, Jan Wierix: The Creation and the Early History of Man, 1607–1608 (London: Richard L. Feigen and Co., 1990), pp. xvii–xix. Bastelaer-Gilchrist 1992, p. 222, no. 164. This print exists in three states, the last one published in the seventeenth century by Claes Jansz Visscher, who also issued a version of this composition in rectangular format with a landscape background (ibid., pp. 223–24, no. 164; the print publisher’s name incorrectly given). There are also two painted copies; see Essen, Kulturstiftung Ruhr, Villa Hügel; Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum; Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Pieter Brueghel der Jüngere—Jan Brueghel der Ältere: Flämische Malerei um 1600; Tradition und Fortschritt, 1997, pp. 358–60, no. 112. One of these may be with this subject listed in the estate inventory of Gillis van Coninxloo (d. 1607), “Een stuck vaert vaercken in ’t cot” (Marlier 1969, p. 151). This entry has been connected with a painting of the same subject auctioned in New York, Christie’s, 19 May 1992, lot 5, as “Marten van Cleve(?).” For various proverbs that have been connected with this composition, see Mori 2003, p. 47. For the painting and print, see Roger van Schoute and Hélène Verougstraete, “A Painted Wooden Roundel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder,” Burlington Magazine 142, no. 1164 (March 2000): 140–46. Sellink 2007, pp. 112–13, nos. 62–63, sug­gests that the subject represents not a condemnation of drunkenness, as generally thought, but the “fickleness of fortune.” Sellink 2007, pp. 248–49, no. 163. They include Fool Hatching an Empty Egg (London, British Museum), dated 1569 and related to B. 182; Misanthrope Robbed by the World, collection of Jean Masson, Amiens, signed “bruegel,” most probably a copy after B. 171, since the com­po­ sition is in the same direction as the print; another copy of the Misanthrope (Ertz 1988/2000, 1:78–79 and fig. 19); Haystack Running after the Horse (Berlin, Kupferstichkabinet), after B. 184; and Each Merchant Praises His Own Wares (Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Kupferstich­kabinett), dated 1573, after B. 175. None of these drawings is attributed to Bruegel in Hans Mielke, Pieter Bruegel: Die Zeichnungen (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996). For a depiction of the caltrops in a manuscript of ca. 1550, see Lawall 1957, p. 214, ill. p. 215. They are probably soldiers attacking a peasant wagon. For the popular theme of “peasant sorrows,” see Jane Susanna Fishman, Boerenverdriet: Violence between Peasants and Soldiers in Early Modern Netherlands Art, Studies in the Fine Arts: Ico­ nography, no. 5 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982). I have yet to find this expression in any proverb collections of the period. Cf. the inscription on Bruegel’s Misanthrope at Naples: “Because the world is so faithless I am going into mourning.” For Bruegel’s painting, see Margaret A. Sullivan, “Bruegel’s Misanthrope: Renaissance Art for a Humanist Audience,” Artibus et historiae, 13, no. 26 (1992): 143–62; Sellink 2007, pp. 250–54, no. 164, who notes that the inscription “does not appear to be in Bruegel’s handwriting.”

notes to pages 87–89

1 1. 12.

1 3. 1 4.

15.

16.

17.

189

We can only speculate as to why the printmaker emphasized the windmill. It figures in several emblem illustrations of the period, but none seems relevant to The Misanthrope; see Henkel and Schöne 1967, cols. 1240–42. Lebeer 1939–40, pp. 202–3, no. 49. For depictions of this proverb in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Hazelzet 2006; Hazelzet 2007, pp. 78–82. It occurs on at least one miseri­ cord; see Marits de Meyer, “ ‘De wereld loopt op stelten’: ‘Men moet zich krommen om door de wereld to kommen,’ ” Volkskunde 62, no. 2:33. A similar subject occurs in a Stammbuch of 1620; see Lieselotte Möller, “Bildgeschichtliche Studien zu Stammbuchbildern II,” Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunstsammlungen 2 (1952): 157–77, esp. 157–58. For its appearance on signboards in Holland and England, see J. van Lennep and J. Ter Gouw, De uithangteekens in verband met geschiedenis en volksleven beschouwd, 4 vols. (Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff, n.d.), 3:209. A drawing attributed to Jan Verbeeck (London, British Museum, inv. no. 1948–12–11–48) shows a related subject: a great crowd of people crouch to enter a giant transparent globe and emerge on the opposite side, some bent almost double. Another group avoids entering the globe entirely. According to the Netherlandish and French inscriptions, people who try to pass through the world with pleasure and greed neglect their affairs, while those who labor faith­f ully enjoy God’s blessing. See Möller, “Bildgeschichtliche Studien,” fig. pp. 163, 167, fig. 7; Haverkamp Begemann 1969, pp. 66 and 283, fig. 4; Paul Vanden­broeck, “Het schildergeschlacht Verbeek: Voorloopige werkkataloog,” Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schoone Kunsten, Antwerpen (1981): 31–60, esp. 36. Ramakers 1996, pp. 188–89. However, Meadow 2002, p. 41, points out that the crawling man (in Fig. 3) is not only crippled but poorly dressed, and suggests that he illustrates the ­humility of the poor, in contrast to the richly dressed young man near him who “spins the world on his thumb.” A similar cutpurse appears in the right back­ ground of Hogenberg’s Al Hoy print, this time without a globe; the accompanying inscription tells us that he who lives by thievery will be hanged. Kamper spreekwoorden 1959, p. 49, no. 28. Conversely, “He that will live in the world must be of the world,” a proverb appearing, incidentally, in various forms in English Renaissance drama; see R. W. Dent, Proverbial Language in English Drama Exclusive of Shakespeare, 1495–1616: An Index (Berkeley: University of ­California Press, 1984), p. 761, no. W873.11. For the Massys print, see Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek Albert I, Cornelis Matsys, 1510/1511–1556/57: Grafisch werk, 1985, cat. by Jan Van der Stock, no. 100, ill. p. 88. For the prints by Van der Heyden, see Lafond-Gilchrist, 2002, pp. 81– 83, no. 16; Hollstein 1949–, 9:27, no. 19, with ill. De Roovere 1955, pp. 331–33: Wie is die nu ter werelt leeft (Who is he who now lives in the world?). In the Duytsche adagia, Den blinde dandere leyden refers to ­u nlearned men who try to teach others (Andriessoon 2003, pp. 110, 216, no. 53.3). ­Marijnissen and Seidel 1984, p. 51, no. 42, cite the use of the parable in various literary ­contexts of the period. Sullivan 1991, pp. 462–63, notes parallels in classical literature to the parable of the blind.

190

notes to pages 90–94

18. Bijns 1875, pp. 335–37, referein xxxiv; see Yoko Mori, “The Influence of ­G erman and Flemish Prints in the Work of Pieter Bruegel,” Bulletin of the Tamara Art School 2 (1976): 17–60, esp. 53–55, the quotation on 55. 19. There are several possible interpretations of this proverb, and Grauls 1957, pp. 114–15, also notes some variants. Marijnissen and Seidel 1984, pp. 42–43, no. 76, settle on the meaning given here as the most likely, citing its use in the play Suzanna, performed in 1607 by the Hasselt rederijker chamber De Rode Roos (Hummelen 1968, p. 116, no. 1 S 3): “We don’t care whose house burns down so long as we can warm ourselves at the coals.” For some observations on this and related images and their possible meanings, see David Kunzle, “ ‘Belling the Cat’—‘Butting the Wall’: Military Elements in Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs,” in Mieder 2004b, pp. 129–61, esp. 153–58. 20. Erasmus 1982–2006, 35:160 (III vi 71); the proverb is repeated in several later proverb collections, including Andriessoon 2003, pp. 65, 172, no. 8.8. See ­Suringer 1873, pp. 429–32, section ccxxviii. 21. Stoett 1943, 2:114–15, no. 1821. Marijnissen also cites a second proverb, “to send one arrow after the other,” that is, to persevere (Marijnissen and Seidel 1984, p. 42, no. 59). 22. David Freedberg (in Tokyo 1989, p. 174, no. 71), translates the French word ioje (joy) as “success,” which accords better with the sense of the Netherlandish lines. 23. Erasmus 1982–2006, 31:379 (I iv 92). As a second meaning for the proverb, Erasmus suggests that it describes those “who dare to attack those whom they cannot harm.” 2 4. This meaning is given to the illustration of an archer shooting at the sky in the moral compendium written for Francis I; see Massing 1995, p. 22. 25. Perhaps relevant here is an emblem in Whitney 1967, facsimile p. 138, depicting a block of marble with one arrow embedded in it and a second arrow propped against it; the accompanying verse tells us that just as whoever tries to pierce a marble wall or pillar with arrows will have the arrows rebound to injure him, so will slander rebound to injure the slanderer. As it happens, Wierix’s archer ­directs his efforts against what seems to be a stone step, a detail not mentioned, however, in the two inscriptions. 26. The Netherlandish term for “seeingly blind” is siendeblindt, for which see Michel Weemans, “Herri met de Bles’s Sleeping Peddler: An Exegetical and Anthro­ pomorphic Landscape,” Art Bulletin 88, no. 3 (September 2006): 459–81, esp. 479 n. 70, with a reference to the Wierix print. 27. Grauls 1957, p. 202. The Flemish verses say the same thing more expansively: the peddler boasts: “Here are nets and trumpets, yes and fine flutes, No better goods may be found in all the land.” His companion replies: “Get you away, peddler, go boast elsewhere, Where people are deaf of hearing and blind of sight.” The “trumpets” (a play on two verbs current in the sixteenth century, trompen, tromperen, meaning “to cheat, or deceive”) are mouth harps, while the “flutes” are actually recorders, which were commonly called f lutes at that time; see Van Bastelaer-Gilchrist 1992, p. 234 n. 116, no. 179. For the symbol­

notes to pages 94–95

28. 2 9. 30.

31. 32.

33.

3 4.

35.

191

ism of the trumpet, see also J. J. Mak, Rhetoricaal Glossarium (Assen: Van ­Gorcum– Dr. H. J. Prakke en H. M. G. Prakke, 1959), pp. 426–27, s.v. “Trompe” and “Trompen.” Ordinantie 1563, fol. 1r. For the symbolism of the eyeglasses, see Grauls 1957, p. 201; Gibson 1992a, p. 37 n. 48. Andriessoon 2003, pp. 82, 189, nos. 25.1–25.3. Goedthals 1568, p. 30; cf. Prov. Comm. 1947, pp. 44, 45, 125, no. 56; David 1606, no. 134. “Everyone is a thief in his own trade” [Elck is een dief tsijnder neering] is cited by Erasmus in his Exomologesis, a treatise on confession of 1524; see ­Wesseling 2002, p. 91, with references to the proverb’s occurrence in earlier literature. Frank and Miner 1937, pp. 68–69, no. cxxv. Andries Vierlingh (1507–ca. 1579), a master of the dikes for William of Orange in the northern Netherlands, describes ignorant and ill-qualified office seekers as wearing “the slippers, the tabards and the fine fur mantles”; quoted in Schama 1987, p. 43. Grauls 1957, pp. 118–25; Meadow 2002, pp. 32–33. Cf. the modern Netherlandish expression aan de kaak stellen, meaning “to expose or denounce someone.” “The jawbone of an ass” is listed by Erasmus in the Adages, referring to hearty eaters who are stupid and useless for anything; see Erasmus 1982–2006, 4:295 (III iii 41). The Harvard Concise Dictionary of Music, ed. Don Michael Randel (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 333, notes that the jawbone of a horse, mule, or donkey was used as a rattle, the teeth vibrating when it was hit by the hand. Employed by American minstrels, this instrument is still found in Latin American popular music. If it was ever so employed in the Middle Ages I do not know. For the earlier manuscript (The Hague, R ijksmuseum MeermannoWestreenianum, MS 10 F 50), see A. J. Bernet Kempers, “Randversieringen van de Meester van Katharina van Kleef: Volkskunde langs de kantlijn,” Bijdragen en Medelingen van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkskunde “Het Nederlands Openlucht Museum” 30, no. 2 (1967): 25–47, esp. 43; for the later example, see The Hours of Mary of Burgundy: Codex Vindobonensis 1857, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbiliothek, ed. Eric Inglis (London: Harvey Miller, 1995), fols. 23r–23v. Fol. 23v shows the same figure traced from the recto, but with a different face; as Rudy 2007, p. 317, suggests, this practice not only saved time and labor but avoided the problem of the paint bleeding through the thin parchment. Although by the late Middle Ages such whimsical figures might have become purely decorative, some viewers might have recalled the original proverb; see Gibson 2007–8, pp. 38–39. H. G. Jelgersma, Galgebergen en galgevelden in West-en Midden Nederland (Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1978), p. 69, ill. opp. p. 65. G. D. J. Schotel briefly discusses the kaak, noting that traces of such structures were still visible in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at Woerden and Ijselstein; see Schotel, Het maatschappelijke leven onser voorvaderen in de zeventiende eeuw, 2nd ed. by H. C. Rogge (1905; repr. Amsterdam: J. G. Strengholt; Arnhem: Gisbers en Van Loon, n.d.), p. 305.

192

notes to pages 95–101

36. Grauls 1957, p. 122, identifies the background “tower” in Wierix’s print as a pillory. 37. Ibid.; Marijnissen and Seidel 1984, p. 42, no. 58. 38. Andriessoon 2003, pp. 99, 206, no. 42.2, and pp. 102, 209, no. 45.7 respectively. The achievements of “Bacchus, god of all the drunkards, who makes many people into fools,” are celebrated in a sixteenth-century Netherlandish poem in Veelderhande 1971, pp. 173–82: “Van Bacchus alder dronckaerts Godt, Die menigte mensch maect tot een sot.” 39. See, e.g., Pikhaus 1988–89, 1:18 and n. 39; Hogenelst 1997, 2:189–90, no. 260. 40. Prov. Comm. 1947, pp. 40, 41, 110–11 , no. 3; cf. Goedthals 1568, p. 49: Minst drinckt, meest gheldt (Least drunk, most money), that is, he who drinks least has the most money. 4 1. Lillian M. C. Randall, “A Mediaeval Slander,” Art Bulletin 60 (1960): 25–40, esp. 29. The proverb could also be understood as “don’t set a fool on eggs (because he will only break them),” that is, don’t send someone unqualified on a mission that calls for a wise man. See Grauls 1959, esp. cols. 66–71. However, that the fool in Wierix’s print is hatching out folly is the more likely meaning. The egg as symbol of folly and evil in general is discussed in Bax 1949, pp. 144– 45; Bax 1979, pp. 191–94. 4 2. Lebeer 1939–40, pp. 204–5, no. 63. For the association of eggs and fools, see also Timothy Hyman and Roger Malbert, Carnivalesque, Catalogue of a National Touring Exhibition Organized by the Hayward Gallery, London, for the Arts Council of England with the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2000), pp. 20–25. A sixteenthcentury Flemish painting (Liège, Collections Artistiques), now titled The ­Everlasting Regeneration of Foolishness, shows a brooding hen hatching out fools from eggs; see ibid., no. 39, ill. p. 22. In a print after Bruegel, The Witch of Malleghem, dated 1559, the lower right corner shows an operation for the stone of folly taking place within an egg; see Van Bastelaer-Gilchrist 1992, pp. 254–58, no. 193; Rotterdam-New York 2001, pp. 193–95, no. 78. In another print, the socalled Family of Fools, issued by Hieronymus Cock, Dame Folly sits in a tent hatching out little fools (Lafond-Gilchrist 2002, pp. 119–20, no. 41). 4 3. Gibson 2006, pp. 113–14; Tlusty 2001, p. 125. 4 4. Grauls 1958. For this proverb and its variations, see also Stoett 1943, 1:240–41, no. 604. 45. Andriessoon 2003, pp. 60, 167 (Prologue). According to Mark Meadow (2003, pp. 20, 34), the earlier oral culture was gradually disappearing among literate urbanites. 46. For this proverb, see Woordenboek 1882–1998, s.v. “Hooi.” 47. Quoted in Erasmus on Women, ed. Erika Rummel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), p. 87; from his Christiani Matrimonii Instituto (Basel: Johan Froben, 1526). 4 8. Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000),

notes to pages 101–102

49.

50.

51.

52.

5 3. 5 4. 55.

193

p. 155. Among the several sixteenth-century Netherlandish translations of this work is Die institutie ende leeringe van ee[n] christlijcke vrouwe (Antwerp: Roelants, 1554). Ill. in Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, ’s Levens Felheid: De Meester van het Amsterdamse Kabinet of de Hausbuch Meester, ca. 1470–1500, ed. J. P. Filedt Kok (Amsterdam: Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum; Maarssen: Gary Schwartz, 1985), p. 227, pl. IIIb (fols. 23b–24a), commentary, p. 242. Lotario dei Segni, De Miseria Condicionis Humane, ed. Robert E. Lewis, Chaucer Library (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978), p. 120: “For there are three things that do not permit a man to stay at home: smoke, the dripping of rain [i.e., a leaking roof ], and a wicked wife.” Petrarch-Rawski 1991, 3:64 (Dialogue 19, “An Irksome Wife”). In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the proverb occurs in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, lines 278–80, and the Tale of Melibee, lines 1086–89 (Chaucer-Benson 1987, pp. 108 and 221 respectively). For Christine de Pizan, see Charity Cannon Willard, Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works (New York: Persea Books, 1984), p. 152. See the exhaustive study of this proverb and its variants by Archer Taylor, “Sunt Tria Damna Domus,” in idem, Selected Writings on Proverbs, ed. Wolfgang Mieder, FF Communica­ tions, no. 216 (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia/Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1975), pp. 133–51, for which reference I am indebted to Wolfgang Mieder. Useful, too, are Pertrarch-Rawski 1991, 4:106–7 n. 2; Brad­bury 2008, p. 354. De Laet 1962, p. 54, no. 894; Kamper spreekwoorden 1959, p. 52, no. 19. Comparable is our own saying “A whistling woman and a crowing hen is neither fit for God nor men” and its variants; for bibliography, see Wolfgang Mieder, ed., “Best of All Possible Friends”: Three Decades of Correspondence between the Folklorists Alan Dundes and Wolfgang Mieder, Supplement Series of Proverbium, vol. 19 (Burlington: University of Vermont, 2006), pp. 17–19. An early example occurs in a poem by John T­aylor: “Ill fares the family that shows / A cock that’s silent, and a hen that crows”; cited in William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550–1640 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 149. Veelderhande 1971, p. 2. Goedthals 1568, p. 22: Goede mans hebben ghemeynlick quade wijfs. There are too many proverbs concerning quarrelsome women, even in Erasmus’s Adages, to give them adequate treatment here. Everaert 1920, pp. 135–44, dated by the editors to ca. 1514–15. Good wives, however, are not ignored. While several of the refereinen in Stijevoort’s collection of 1524 lament ill-tempered wives and beleaguered husbands, a surprising ­number celebrate happy marriages with such refrains as “Is it not an earthly paradise?” and “A well-loved wife is a house full of peace”; see Stijevoort 1930, 1:63–64, no. 31; pp. 187–98, no. 89; 192–93, no. 98; 2:149–51, no. 206. It is not un­ likely that they were specifically composed for particular occasions such as a wedding banquet, although the last one cited may also have been part of a purely rhetorical exercise, for it is one of a pair contrasting good and bad marriages: “Is it not a heaven on earth” (ibid., 2:147–51, nos. 205–6).

194

notes to page 103

56. Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, in Chaucer-Benson 1987, p. 111, lines 487–90. Chaucer plays on this theme again in The Merchant’s Tale, in which the elderly Januarius is told that if he is determined, against advice, on taking a young wife, then “Paraunter she may be youre purgatorie! She may be Goddes meene and Goddes whippe; Thanne shal youre soule up to hevene skippe” (ibid., p. 159, lines 1665–73). 57. Ibid., p. 869, note to lines 489–90, with further material in Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1933), p. 804, note to line 489. See also Takami Matsuda, “A Note on Chaucer’s Purgatory,” in Language and Texts: Beowulf, Chaucer and Related Works 1 (Tokyo: Center for Medieval Studies, University of Tokyo, 1996), pp. 35–43. I am much indebted to the author for a copy of his article. 5 8. Johannes Pauli, Schimpf und Ernst, ed. Johannes Bolte, 2 vols. (Berlin: H. Stuben­ rauch, 1924), no. 757; Hans Sachs, Sämtliche Fabeln und Schwänke, ed. Edmund Goetze and Carl Drescher, 6 vols. (Halle a. S.: Max Niemeyer, 1893–1913), 5:172–74, no. 12. For similar anecdotes, see Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of FolkLiterature, rev. and enl. ed., 6 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955–58), 4:368, no. T251.1.2.1. The shrewish wife in sixteenth-century ­literature is also discussed in Gibson 2006, pp. 124–44. 59. The marital struggle for the breeches is surveyed in Metken 1996, pp. 9–95, a reference for which I am greatly indebted to Wolfgang Mieder. See also Gibson 1978, pp. 677–79; Gibson, 1979a; Wilma van Engeldorp Gastelaars, Ic sal u smiten op uwen tant: Geweld tussen man en vrouw in laatmiddeleeuwse kluchten, Koren­ bloemen 1 (Amsterdam: Vakgroep Historische Letterkunde, Instituut voor Neerlandistiek, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 1984); Lène Dresen-Coenders, “De strijd om de broek: De verhouding man/vrouw in het begin van de ­moderne tijd (1450–1630),” Revisor 4, no. 6 (1977): 29–37, 77; idem, Helse en Hemelse: Vrou­ wenmacht omstreeks 1500 (Nijmegen: SUN/LOKV, 1988), pp. 39–45; Peacock 1989; Peacock 1999, pp. 13–23; Yvonne Bleyerveld, “De vrouw met de broek aan,” in Spreekwoorden 2006, pp. 18–23. The popularity in art and drama of this and similar subjects of marital strife may reflect the growing economic power of women, especially wives, in the later Middle Ages, a topic thoughtfully explored by Mary S. Hartman, The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 60. Das böss weyb met dem worten, qürtzen und stein gut ze machen, in Hans Sachs, ed. Alfred von Keller and Edmund Goetze, 26 vols. (Tübingen: Literarischer Verein, 1870– 1908), 14:270. 61. Pikhaus 1988–89, 1:193. 62. Erasmus-Thompson 1965, p. 382. 63. For this theme in manuscripts, see Randall 1966, p. 200, s.v. “Proverbs, fight over pants,” and fig. 576. For misericords, see Elaine C. Block, “A Note on ­A nother Fight for the Pants in the Family,” Profane Arts 8, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 90–99; idem, “The Fight for the Trousers: A Note,” Profane Arts 8, no. 2 (Fall 1999 [sic]): 274–81. 6 4. See Baltimore, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Painted Prints: The Revelation of Color

notes to pages 103–107

65. 6. 6 67.

68. 9. 6 70. 7 1.

72. 73.

74.

75.

76.

7 7.

195

in Northern Renaissance and Baroque Engravings, Etchings and Woodcuts, ed. Susan ­Dackerman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), pp. 156–58, no. 25, with a translation of the inscriptions; I have slightly altered the translation given here. This probably accounts for the erroneous identification of the husband as a “maid-servant” in Devisscher and Denhaene 2006, p. 206. See Ramakers 1996, p. 135 and n. 214. Prognosticatie van desen tocomende[n] Jare . . . by Meester Hongerenborch (Antwerp: Jan van Ghelen, n.d.), in Van Kampen et al. 1980, p. 197, lines 95–97. Another ­misogynist joke occurs in Kamper spreekwoorden 1959, p. 33, lines 2–3, where we are told that he who wants to hear a sermon can slap the ears of a bad wife. If he gives her a good slap, he will hear a sermon all day. Erasmus 1982–2006, 1:246–47 (I iii 14), who notes that Varro applies this saying to troublesome wives. Fritz Grossmann, Bruegel: The Paintings (London: Phaidon Press, n.d.), pl. 130. Grauls 1957, pp. 204–5. Adriaan J. Barnouw, The Fantasy of Pieter Brueghel (New York: Lear Publishers, 1947), p. 96. Lebeer 1969, p. 169, no. 74, uses Van Bastelaer’s title for the print, “The Carefree Peddler,” but adds that it might better be called “The Deceitful Peddler.” The present discussion summarizes, with some new material, Gibson 1992a, pp. 36–37. See Hummelen 1968, p. 176, no. 3 C 32: Spelen van sinne vol scoone moralisacien . . . Ghespeelt  .  .  . binnen der stadt van Andtwerpen op dLandjuweel. (Antwerp: Willem ­Silvius, 1562), fols. Q qqqiv–RRrij; for the contents of the play, see Gibson 1992a, pp. 36–37. Lambrecht 1945, p. 169. See also Woordenboek 1882–1998, s.v. “Schade,” in which schay and scha are given as variant spellings of schade. Cf. Goedthals 1568, p. 62: Die geldeloos ende weeldeloos is, wat maect hij met de bruyt (Whoever is without money and wealth, what has he to do with the bride?). While possibly referring to the luckless companions of Vrouw Schaeye, this proverb more likely advises those without proper means not to take a bride. See Gibson 1978, p. 679, and fig. 8; Woordenboek 1882–1998, s.v. “Kauwen”; I am indebted for this reference to Yoko Mori. Cf. Erasmus 1982–2006, 35:176 (III vi 96): “To scratch one’s head, and similar phrases,” of which he says, “these are the gestures of one who is thoughtful and thinking about making a change which he may regret.” Joannes Sartorius, Adagiorum chiliades tres . . . (Antwerp, 1561), 1:5, no. 45, cited in Woordenboek 1882–1998, s.v. “Deur.” For the variant proverb, see Kamper ­spreekwoorden 1959, p. 11, no. 29: “It is all sung before a deaf man’s door”; ­A ndriessoon 2003, pp. 64, 171, no. 7.5, in which it appears in a list of examples of fruitless labor or impossible things, including “To carry water in a sieve” and “To gape against an oven,” the latter represented in Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs (see Fig. 3, right; Marijnissen and Seidel 1984, p. 41, no. 35). Quoted in Guido Marnef, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation: Underground Protestantism

196

notes to page 108

in a Commercial Metropolis, trans. J. C. Grayson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins ­University Press, 1996), p. 51. Even earlier, when Bernardino of Siena decided to enter the Franciscan Order, a family member complained that friars were complete pigs, living in luxury and idleness, living off the labor of others, and thinking of nothing but food (Mormando 1999, p. 36). That similar anti­ mendicant sentiments inform Jean de Meun’s addition to the Roman de la Rose is suggested by Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their Posterity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), esp. pp. 256–57. Penn R. Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 1986), focuses on the antimendicant theme in English literature. 78. Erasmus-Miller 1979, p. 99 (phrases between parentheses added by Erasmus in the 1514 edition), and Erasmus-Thompson 1965, pp. 203–17, respectively. Erasmus also denounces mendicants at length in his Adages, Erasmus 1982– 2006, 34:75–76 (II viii 65), while in two of his colloquies, “The Funeral” and “The Seraphic Funeral,” the dying man is sur­rounded by Franciscans and other mendicants eager to benefit from his will (Erasmus-Thompson 1965, pp. 357–73 and 500–516, respectively). These colloquies were later reworked into two poems by the Antwerp rederijker Cornelis Crul. In one poem, a Franciscan urges a dying woman to wear the headdress of his order, because while the heretics (Lutherans) believe that one can be saved by faith alone, the ­Franciscan hood saves even without belief (ibid., pp. 411–12); see Gilbert de Groote, “Erasmus en de rederijkers van de XVIe eeuw,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, Belgsch tijdschrift voor philogie en geschiedenis 29 (1951): 389–420, 1029–62, esp. 406–14. 7 9. Rabelais-Screech 2006, pp. 493 and 468 respectively (book 3, chapters 22 and 15); I have altered the latter quotation slightly to conform more closely to the original French text. See, e.g., Mireille Huchon, ed., Rabelais: Oeuvres complètes, with François Moreau (Paris: Éditions de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1994). In De Beruote Broers (The Barefoot Brothers), a farce performed at Brussels in 1559, a ­destitute porter is asked to deliver a gift of food to the “barefoot brothers” in the Franciscan monastery but instead takes it home to feed his own “barefoot brothers,” his eight hungry children. Although the play was well received, being awarded first prize in a dramatic competition, it was soon condemned by both church and government authorities as deriding the Franciscans for collecting alms at the expense of the truly poor. See Van Eeghem 1937, pp. xv–xxii (commentary), and 1–26 (text). 8 0. See Mauquoy-Hendrickz 1978–82, 1:516–17; Holm Bevers, “Willem van Haecht composuit: Zu einem Aspekt der Antwerpener Stichproduction um 1570,” in Die Malerei Antwerpens—Gattingen, Wirkungen; Studien zur flämischen Kunst des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, Internationales Kolloquium Wien 1993, ed. Ekkehard Mai, Karl Schutz, and Hans Vlieghe with Christiane Stukenbrock (Cologne: Locher, 1994), pp. 179–85; James Clifton, “Adriaen Huybrechts, the Wiericx Brothers, and Confessional Politics in the Netherlands,” in Prentwerk/Print Work, 1500–1700,

notes to pages 108–109

81.

82.

3. 8 84. 85.

86.

197

Jan de Jong et al., Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 52 (2001): 105–25, esp. 107. For Willem van Haecht as a Lutheran, see C. G. N. De Vooys, “Een Allegorie van Willem van Haecht in woord en beeld,” Oud Holland 45 (1928): 147–56; G. J. Steenbergen, “De Apostelspelen van Willem van Haecht,” in Liber alumnorum Prof. Dr. E. Rombauts, Universiteit te Leuven, Werken op het gebied van de ­geschiedenis en de philologie, 5e reeks, deel 5 (Louvain: Universi­teitsbibliotheek, 1968), pp. 161–77. Godevaert van Haecht, De Kroniek van Godevaert van Haecht over de troubelen van 1565 tot 1574 te Antwerpen en elders, ed. Rob. Van Roosbroeck, 2 vols. (Antwerp: De Sikkel, Van Haecht, 1929–33), 1:47, entry for June 1566. Godevaert was probably also a Lutheran; see J. van Roey, “Het Antwerpse geschlacht van Haecht (Verhaecht), tafelmakers, schilders, kunsthandelaars,” in Miscellanea Jozef Duverger: Bijdragen tot de kunstgeschiedenis der Nederlanden (Ledeberg, Ghent: ­Vereniging voor de Geschieidenis der Textielkunsten, 1968), 1:216–30, esp. 219–20. Coigneau 1980–83, 2:327; for the manuscript source and its date, see 1:73–74 (Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS II 129). In an engraving of ca. 1570 by ­Pieter van der Heyden, the pope threatens the Protestants with “our brother Franciscus full of cunning”; see Amsterdam, Rijksprentenkabinet, Geschiedenis in beeld, 2000, cat. by J. Beijerman-Schols et al., ed. J. F. Heibroek, p. 67. For the campaign of the Observant Franciscans against heresy in Holland, see James D. Tracy, “Elements of Anticlerical Sentiment in the Province of Holland under Charles V,” in Dykema and Oberman 1993, pp. 265–66, 268. For comparable anti-Franciscan sentiment in France, see Jane Dempsey Douglass, “A Report on Anticlericalism in Three French Women Writers, 1404–1549,” in ibid., pp. 250–51; Megan C. Armstrong, The Politics of Piety: Franciscan Preachers during the Wars of Religion, 1560–1600 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press; Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2005). Mauquoy-Hendrickz 1978–82, 1:518. Lebeer 1969, p. 165, no. 70; Van Bastelaer-Gilchrist 1992, p. 237, no. 177. Judith Dundas, “Emblems on the Art of Painting: Pictura and Purpose,” in Emblems and Art History: Nine Essays, ed. Alison Adams, Glasgow Emblem Studies 1 (1996): 69–95, quotation on 69. For the opinion expressed by one emblem writer on the close relation between image and text, see David Graham, “Pictures Speaking, Pictures Spoken To: Guillaume de la Perrière and Em­blematic ‘Illustration,’ ” in “Visual Words and Verbal Pictures: Essays in Honour of Michael Bath,” ed. Alison Saunders and Peter Davidson, Glasgow Emblem Studies, special number (2005): 69–87. For the history of the emblem, as well as its structure and functions, see Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, 2nd ed., Sussidi Eruditi 16 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1964); Von Monroy 1964; John Manning, The Emblem (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). The varying relationships between image and texts in emblems is discussed by Daniel Russell, “Illustration, ­Hieroglyph, Icon: The Status of the Emblem Picture,” in Polyvalenz und Multi­

198

notes to pages 109–112

funktionalität der Emblematik / Multivalence and Multifunctionality of the Emblem, Akten des 5. International Kongresses der Society für Emblem Studies, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference of the Society for Emblem Studies, ed. Wolfgang Harms and Dietmar Peil with Michael Waltenberger, 2 vols., Mikrokosmos, vol. 65 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002), 1:73–90. 87. Whitney 1969, facsimile p. 24. See also Virgil 1999, 1:46–47, lines 92–93. For this proverb, see Walter S. Gibson, “The Strawberries of Hieronymus Bosch,” Cleveland Studies in the History of Art 8 (2003): 24–33, esp. 27–29. 88. See Von Monroy 1964; The Emblem Tradition in the Low Countries: Selected Papers of the Leuven International Emblem Conference, 18–23 August 1996, ed. John Manning, Karel Portman, and Marc van Vaeck, Imago Figurata, Studies, vol. 1b ­( Turnhout: Brepols, 1999). 89. Vandommele 2007, pp. 6–10. The role of emblems in rederijker poetry and drama in general is discussed in Von Monroy 1964, pp. 24–38. 9 0. Other antecedents of the emblem book, including Brant’s Ship of Fools, are ­discussed in Von Monroy 1964, pp. 13–23. 91. For a bibliography of the various editions of Alciati’s emblems, see Henry Green, Andrea Alciati and His Book of Emblems: A Biographical and Bibliographical Study (1872; New York: Burt Franklin, n.d.), pp. 103–284. 92. See Callahan 1973. 93. Erasmus 1982–2006, 31:284 ( I iii 59). 94. Callahan 1973, pp. 136–38; see also Andrea Alciati, A Book of Emblems: The “Emblematum Liber” in Latin and English, trans. and ed. John F. Moffitt ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2004), pp. 161–62, emblem 137. 95. Erasmus 1982–2006, 34:167–82 (II x 98). 9 6. For Alciati’s interest in proverbs, especially those drawn from Erasmus, see Virginia W. Callahan, “The De Copia,” in Essays on the Works of Erasmus, ed. L. DeMolen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 108; William S. Heck­ scher, The Princeton Alciati Companion (New York: Garland Publishing, 1989), p. 83, s.v. “Proverbium.” 97. For the inf luence of the Adages on other emblem writers, see Massing 1995, pp. 30–31, 56–57. Further proverbs employed by the emblem writers can be found illustrated in Henkel and Schöne 1967. 98. Gillis Corrozet, L’Hecatongraphie (1544) et Les Emblemes du Tableau de Cebes (1543), ed. with a critical study by Alison Adams (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1997), title page. 99. See Van Diest’s preface to the “goetwillighen Lezer” (benevolent reader), in Johannes Sambucus, Emblemata I. Sambuci: In Nederlantsche tale ghetrouwelik overgeset (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1566); the original text reprinted, with English translation in Porteman 1990, pp. 44 and 46 respectively. 100. I.e., Niet verder sien dan sijnen nuese lanck is, De fortuyne helpen den stouten, Als elck op thoochste is, dan daelt hy, In tijts salmen remedie soecken; quoted from Van Diest’s ­t ranslation of Sambucus, Emblemata (in Portmann 1990, pp. 33, 48, 51, 52 ­respectively). Symptomatic of the close relationship of proverbs and emblems is a manuscript of ca. 1550 (Princeton University Library), in which the

notes to pages 112–113

199

a­ nonymous owner freely mingled emblems, devices (image and motto without explanatory text), and illustrated proverbs with verses much in the fashion of the Proverbes en rimes; see Lawall 1957. 101. Whitney 1967, facsimile p. 217. Depicting a sheaf of hay attached to a pole as a field marker, this emblem occurs in several earlier collections (Henkel and Schöne 1967, col. 328). 102. Whitney 1967, facsimile p. 121; Erasmus 1982–2006, 33:3–17 (II i 1). 103. Ter Laan 1952, pp. 311–13; for Cats’s literary sources, including proverbs, see Jacob Cats, Sinne-en minnebeelden, ed. Hans Luijten, 3 vols., Koninklijke Neder­ landse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Monumenta Literaria Neerlandica 9, 2 (The Hague: Constantijn Huygens Instituut, 1996), vol. 2. 104. De Coo 1975, p. 97, figs. 25, 26; p. 102, fig. 33; p. 105, fig. 36. Both plates are in Antwerp-Deurne, Museum Sterckhof, one dated 1550 on the obverse. De Coo assumed that the images on the reverse were painted ca. 1568–69, soon after the presumed publication date of the Twelve Proverbs. Marlier 1969, p. 149, no. 5b, however, dates the later additions ca. 1600. See also Ertz 1988/2000, no. A63, ill. p. 198. 105. These copies are surveyed in Marlier 1969, pp. 144–50; Ertz 1988/2000, 1:76–104. For the artistic relationship of Pieter the Younger to his father, see Mori 2003. 106. Emblemata Saecularia: Mira et Iucunda Varietate Saculi Huius Mores ita Exprimentia, ut Sodalitatum Symbolis Insigniisque Conscribendis & Depingendis  .  .  . Stamm und ­Wappenbüchlein  .  .  . (Frankfurt a. M.: J. Th. and J. I. de Bry, 1596; 2nd ed., ­Oppenheim: Typis H. Galleri, 1611). For the two editions, see Landwehr 1972, no. 154 and 155 respectively. A facsimile of the 1611 edition is in De Bry-Kemp 1994. 107. For friendship albums, see Peter Amelung, “Die Stammbücher des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts als Quelle der Kultur- und Kunstgeschichte,” in Stuttgart, ­Staatsgalerie, Zeichnung in Deutschland: Deutsche Zeichner, 1540–1640, 1979–80, cat. by Heinrich Geissler, 2 vols., 2:211–22; Stammbücher des 16. Jahrhunderts, ed. ­Wolfgang Klose, Wolfenbüttler Forschungen 42 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1989), pp. 5–17. Such albums seem to have been very popular at the court of William of Orange, especially among the ladies; see Marie-Ange Delen, Het hof van Willem van Oranje (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, ca. 2002), pp. 184–91, with examples of the verses inscribed in them. 108. Abraham Ortelius, Album Amicorum Abraham Ortelius, reproduced in facsimile and ed. Jean Puraye with Marie Delcourt et al. (Amsterdam: A. L. Van Gent en Co., 1969). Cf. the drawings contributed by the Haarlem artist Cornelis Ketel to the stam ofte vrient-boeck (genealogical register or “friend-book,” i.e., album amicorum) of a certain lord of Wulp; see Karel van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious ­Netherlandish and German Painters, from the First Edition of the Schilder-boeck (1603–1604), trans. and ed. Hessel Miedema, 6 vols. (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1994–99), 1:372– 73, fol. 278r. 109. David Beck, a seventeenth-century Dutch schoolteacher, records how he and several companions leafed through an out stam of lietboeckien (old genealogical or

200

notes to pages 113–117

song book, which may have been a songbook serving as a friendship album); see Beck, Spiegel van mijn leven: Een Haags dagboek uit 1624, ed. Sv. E. Veldhuijzen, Eco­ documenten, deel 3 (Hilversum: Verloren, 1993), p. 210, entry for 24 N ­ ovember. For copies of emblem books converted into friendship albums, see The Hague 1990, nos. 2, 5, 6, 8; and Alison Adams, “A Manuscript Epigram by Hadrianus Junius,” Society for Emblem Studies Newsletter 16 (January 1995): 8. 110. See De Bry-Kemp 1994, p. 206, for De Tournes’s volume and for Stammbücher published in Germany in the later sixteenth century. 111. Even earlier, De Bryn’s father, Theodor, published the Emblemata Nobilitati et Vulgo (1592), a small friendship album of only 21 illustrations issued in 1592. See Land­ wehr 1972, nos. 152 and 153 (2nd ed.); and the facsimile edition, Stammbuch 1594–1604: Theodor de Bry, Stam und Wappenbuchlein, Francof. Ad M. 1592, Herzog August D. J. zu Braunschweig und Lüneburg, ed. Wolfgang Harms and Maria von Katte, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Müller und Schindler, 1974). For this and similar volumes, see Cornelia Kemp, “Vita Corneliana: Das emblematische Stammbuch van Theodor de Bry bis Peter Rollos,” in The Emblem in Renaissance and Baroque Europe: Tradition and Variety; Select Papers of the Glasgow International Emblem Conference 13–17 August 1990, ed. Alison Adams and Anthony J. Harper, Symbola et Emblemata 3 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), pp. 53–69. 112. The differences between the two editions are discussed in De Bry-Kemp, 1994, pp. 211–19. The four prints in the 1596 edition are, together with their final plate numbers in the 1611 edition, 41. Haystack Chasing the Horse; 59. Quarrelsome Housewife; 60. Man Warming Himself at a Burning House; and 62. Man with the Moneybag and His Flatterers. Four new ones appear in the 1611 edition: 10. Misanthrope; 11. Begging at the Deaf Man’s Door; 13. Every Peddler Praises His Own Wares; and 21. An Archer Shooting All His Arrows (De Bry-Kemp 1994, p. 220). A copy of the Kaakspeler is listed as an unnumbered image before emblem no. 36, presumably in the 1611 edition; see Van Bastelaer-Gilchrist 1992, p. 233, no. 174; also Lebeer 1969, p. 164, no. 68; described but unillustrated in De Bry-Kemp 1994, p. 220. There may also have been a third and possibly a fourth edition of De Bry’s album, but this is uncertain. Landwehr 1972, no. 157, and De Bry-Kemp 1994, p. 225, list a second seventeenth-century edition published together with ­a nother work at Frankfurt in 1627. 113. Noted by Grauls 1957, p. 203. 114. Cf. Tlusty 2001, p. 119, who notes several instances in sixteenth-century ­Augsburg of men excusing their drunkenness on the grounds that they had gone to the tavern to escape their quarrelsome wives. 115. Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 264–65 (Epistles 1.2.27); see also ­Erasmus 1982–2006, 33:141–42 (II iii 23), 264–65 (II v 52), and 34:295 (III iii 40). 116. De Bry-Kemp 1994, no. 12; for the verses, see p. 32. The composition was ­apparently copied, in the same direction, from a painting attributed to Pieter Aertsen and dated ca. 1570, now in the possession of Queen Elizabeth II of England. See Utrecht 1981, p. 44, fig. 28.

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chapter five. the battle for the breeches 1. For a shorter version of this study, see Gibson 2009. The present chapter was substantially completed before Metken’s Der Kampf um die Hose (Metken 1996) came to my attention. 2. Quoted from Jean-Marie Dodu, The Gutenberg Bible: A Commentary, Historical Background, Transcription, Translation, 2 vols. (N.p.: Éditions les Incunables, 1985), 2:789. 3. Erasmus 1982–2006, 2:221–22 (I ix 73) and n. 2. 4. John A. F. Sawyer, The Fifth Gospel: Isaiah in the History of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 5. Similarly, in Joseph Blenkinsopp, Opening the Sealed Book: Interpretations of Isaiah in Late Antiq­uity (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2006), p. 224, Isaiah 4:1 receives no more than a passing reference in the context of the prophetic theme of the “Remnant of Israel.” 6. Quoted in Cyril Mango, Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), p. 209. 7. Metken 1996, p. 107, cited from Joseph von Lassberg, Lieder-Saal, 4 vols. (Eppishausen, 1820–25), 1:367. 8. Philips van Marnix van St. Aldegonde, Den Byencorf der H. Roomsche Kercke, ­bloemlezing, ed. W. A. Ornée and L. Strengholt (Zutphen: B. V. W. J. Thieme, [ca. 1974]), pp. 110–11. 9. Septem mulieres, reprinted in Adelbert von Keller, Fastnachtspiel aus dem Fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts, 4 vols. (1853; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1965–66), 4 (Nachlese):14–16, no. 122. 10. See John D. Davis, The Westminster Dictionary of the Bible, rev. Henry Snyder ­G ehman (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1944), pp. 377–78, s.v. “Marriage.” 1 1. Solomon and Marcolphus 1995, pp. 185–95. See also Salomon ende Marcolphus 1941, pp. 28–32; the editor notes (pp. 62–63) that in the original tale, which goes back to classical antiquity, only two wives per man are mentioned, but the number was probably increased to seven under the influence of Isaiah’s verse. 12. Some of these images were first discussed in detail in Lebeer 1939–40, pp. 212–16. See also Van Vaeck 1994, 3:739–43; Metken 1996, pp. 96–137. 13. Pigler 1974, 2:584; Lutz Rörich, Lexikon der sprichtwörtlichen Redensarten, 2 vols. (Freiburg: Herder, 1974), 1:440–41. The two subjects are uniquely brought together in an early-seventeenth-century drawing by Augustin Braun: in the left foreground a man places his breeches on a woman, while in the right ­distance, another pair of breeches is fought for by a group of women (Metken 1996, p. 65 with ill.). Both Metken 1996 and Hazelzet 2007, pp. 166–76, ­distinguish between the two types of battle for the breeches. 1 4. But see Woordenboek 1882–1998, s.v. “Broek,” which reminds us that breeches were worn as undergarments by upper-class women beginning in the seventeenth century. Cf. Fig. 75, in which one of the struggling women exposes her bare backsides to view, although in view of the satirical subject matter, perhaps

202

15. 1 6. 1 7.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

notes to pages 120–122

we should not assume that this detail documents actual fashions in the ­seven­teenth century. Kamper spreekwoorden 1959, p. 72, line 13: Ist anders niet dan een Meysken, soe en behoeft ghien broexken. See Metken 1996, pp. 9–32. Reprinted in Aby Warburg, “Artistic Exchanges between North and South in the Fifteenth Century,” in idem, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, intro. Kurt W. Forster, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), pp. 275–80, esp. 275–76. For this and some of the other images discussed in this chapter, see also Peacock 1989, pp. pp. 98–115; Metken 1996. Max von Boehn describes such breeches as “shaped like bathing drawers,” a gar­ ment to which the stockings were tightly laced (Von Boehm 1932–37, p. 193). Jones 2002, p. 29 and fig. 2.8; see also Van Beuningen and Koldeweij 1993, p. 258, inv. no. 0966, fig. 625. Cf. a medieval badge showing a woman pushing a wheelbarrow full of phalluses, ill. in McDonald 2006, p. 4, fig. 1.3. For the possible functions of such images, including the apotropaic, see J. B. Bedaux, “Profane en sacrale amuletten,” and Malcolm Jones, “Een andere kijk op ­profane insignes,” both in Heilig en profaan: Laatmiddeleeuwse insigne in cultuurhistorisch perspectief, ed. A. M. Koldeweij and A. Willemsen (Amsterdam: Van Soeren en Co., 1995), pp. 26–35 and 64–74 respectively. A. M. Koldeweij, “A Barefaced Roman de la Rose (Paris, B. N., ms. fr. 25526) and Some Late Medieval Mass-Produced Badges of a Sexual Nature,” in Flanders in a European Perspective: Manuscript Illumination around 1400 in Flanders and Abroad; ­Proceedings of the International Colloquium, Leuven, 7–10 September 1993, ed. Maurits Smeyers and Bert Cardon, Corpus van verluchte handschriften / Corpus of ­Illuminated manuscripts, vol. 8 (Louvain: Peeters, 1995), pp. 499–516 and figs. 4, 8. See also Jones 2002, p. 268, with references to further examples. This motif must have enjoyed a certain popularity in the later Middle Ages. In the Tuscan town of Massa Marittima, for example, the thirteenth-century loggia housing the public fountains contains a damaged fresco on an inner wall, ­possibly of the fourteenth century, known appropriately as the Albero della fecondità (Tree of Fertility): it shows a great phallus-bearing tree harvested by a group of women. See Piero Torriti, Massa Marittima: Nuova guida pratica (Florence: Bonechi Edizioni, 2003), pp. 34–37, ill. p. 37. My warmest thanks to Anne Dunlop for this reference. See Jones 2002, p. 255. The complete print ill. in Geisberg-Strauss 1974, 3:790–91, nos. G.825–26. For another version of this print with a different ­inscription (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum), see Barbara Dienst, Der Kosmos des Peter Flötner: Eine Bildwelt der Renaissance in Deutschland (Munich: Deutscher ­Kunstverlag, 2002), pp. 284–92. See Joldersma 1982, 1:xcv–xcvii on erotic songs in general and esp. nos. 178, 189, 191, 206, 209. In the comic poem Wittenwiller’s Ring, some fifty-nine lines (2128–86) describe the sexual insatiability of Metzli, the grotesque peasant

notes to pages 122–124

2 4.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

203

heroine (Wittenwiler’s Ring 1969, pp. 28–29). Similarly, in two comic plays, one English (mid-fifteenth-century), the other Tyrolean (1529), wives complain of their husbands’ “inadequate penile endowment” (Jones 2002, pp. 261–62). Der vrouwen nateure 1980, unpaginated, where the passage is attributed to ­Solomon, traditionally considered the author of the book of Proverbs; see the introduction, pp. 14–15. Proverbs 30:15–16 finds an echo in Brant’s Ship of Fools (Brant-Zeydel 1962, p. 214, chapter 64, “Of Bad Women”). A related idea is expressed in The Celestina (act 1): “Haven’t you read what the philosophers say, that as matter desires form, so woman desires man?” (Celestina 1962, p. 11). This was an old notion: ­according to Hesiod and other ancient writers, the seer Teirasias (also spelled Tiresias), having been both man and woman, claimed that women had more pleasure in the sex act than the man; see, e.g., Phlegon of Tralle’s Book of Marvels, trans. and ed. William Hansen (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1996), pp. 37–38, 113–16. The belief that an unmarried woman’s sexual urge is stronger than a man’s was common in the sixteenth century (Stewart 2003, p. 143). Later ideas about the “needs” of the womb are discussed by Laurinda S. Dixon, Perilous Chastity: Women and Illness in Pre-Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Hind 1938–48, vol. 1, part 1, pp. 63–64, no. 5. See also Munich, Bayerischen Staats­bi­bliothek, Die Graphiksammlung des Humanisten Hartmann Schedel, 1999, pp. 284–85, no. 99, in which Béatrice Hernad (p. 284), following Hind, suggests that the Italian print and its putative German model derive instead from a common source. Hind 1938–48, 1, pt. 1, cites Warburg, but says that the print’s precise subject is unclear. Metken 1996, pp. 96–97, does not mention Isaiah’s verse in her ­discussion of this print. See also Hazelzet 2007, p. 166. Cf. the landscapes, gardens of love, and the like that are recorded as subjects for domestic tapestries, tempera paintings on cloth, and wall murals long before they appeared in panel paintings and prints; see Catherine Reynolds, “Patinir and Depictions of Land­scape in the Netherlands,” in Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, Patinir: Essays and Critical Catalogue, 2007, ed. Alejandro Vergara, pp. 97– 115, esp. 110–12. See, e.g., Josef Weingartner, “Die profane Wandmalerei Tirols im Mittelalter,” Münchner Jahrbuch für bildenden Kunst, N.F. 5, Heft 1 (1928): 1–63; A. Bohat, “Les peintures murales de la Renaissance au Château de Busset (Allier),” Bibliothèque d’humanisme et renaissance: Travaux et documents 41, no. 2 (1979): 245–52; Yvonne Bleyerfeld, Hoe bedriechlijck dat die vrouwen zijn: Vrouwenlisten in de beeldende kunst in de Nederlanden, circa 1350–1650 ([Leiden]: Primavera Pers, 2000), pp. 27–56. See Raimonde van Marle, Iconographie de l’art profane au moyen âge au Renaissance, et la décoration des demeures, 2 vols. (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1971), 2:426–32. For an early-fifteenth-century Italian fresco of this subject, see Georg ­Troescher, Burgundischer Malerei, 2 vols. (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1966), 1:291 and 2: figs. 491–92. It was also depicted in tapestries; see Joan Evans, Art in Medieval France, 987–1498 (London: Geoffrey Cumberledge, Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 183.

204

notes to pages 124–129

3 0. Ill. in Hollstein 1949–, 12:68; Gibson 1973, p. 84, fig. 68. 3 1. For the morris dance in art and drama, see Heinrich Göbel, Wandteppiche, 2 parts in 4 vols. (Leipzig: Van Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1923–28), part 1, vol. 2, p. 133; Dietrich Huschenbett, “Die Frau met dem Apfel und Frau Venus in ­Moriskentanz und Fastnachtspiel,” in Volkskultur und Geschichte: Festgabe für Josef Dünninger zum 65. Geburtstag (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1970), pp. 585–603. See also Heinrich Kohlhaussen, “Die Minne in der deutschen Kunst des Mittelalters,” Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft 9 (1942): 145–72, esp. 161–66; Philipp Maria Halm, Erasmus Grasser (Augsburg: B. Filser, 1928), pp. 131–47; Robert L. McGrath, “The Dance as Pictorial Metaphor,” Gazette des beaux-arts 6e pér., 89 (1977): 81–92, esp. 85–90. 32. See Metken 1996, p. 100 with ill. Cf. an anonymous engraving issued ca. 1600 by the Amsterdam print publisher Joos de Bosscher. It depicts seven women ­struggling for a large sausage; nevertheless, the inscription below assures us that we see here “seven women fight[ing] over one man’s breeches.” See Schaeps 1994, pp. 272–73 and fig. 20; Hazelzet 2007, pp. 168–69. 3 3. Metken 1996, pp. 102–3, with ill. 3 4. The print is identified as a battle for the breeches by Metken 1996, p. 97; Grössinger 2002, p. 118; Janez Höfler, Der Meister E.S.: Ein Kapital europäischer Kunst des 15. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2007), 1:115; 2: fig. 308. Höfler, whose dating of the print I follow, connects its subject with Isaiah 4:1 (p. 193 n. 99). 3 5. For the same conclusion, see Hazelzet 2007, p. 166. 36. Van Beuningen and Koldeweij 1993, p. 241, inv. 1745, fig. 541. 37. For the knee breeches with stockings in the sixteenth century, see Von Boehn 1932–37, 2:127–28. 38. Isaiah 3:16–23; see Jones 2002, p. 233. 39. For the original inscriptions, see Lebeer 1939–40, p. 214. 40. To the impression of Hogenberg’s print illustrated in Fig. 68 has been added, at the lower left of the mat, a small sheet of paper with a verse in French. Since it is apparently typeset and not engraved on the plate itself, it is possible that it comes from a later, unknown state of the print, for new verses were often added in this manner. These lines also comment on the image but in somewhat more discrete terms: “Gentle gallants, be courageous, Because for a pair of breeches seven amorous ladies, one sees here, fight with all their power, Because each wants to have it.” 4 1. Coigneau 1980–83, 2:303–4 and n. 139, where he notes the parallels between the poem and Hogenberg’s print; for the source of the text, see ibid., 1:162ff., no. NR 20. 4 2. De Amabili Ecclesiae Concordia, quoted in Erwin Panofsky, “Erasmus and the Visual Arts,” Journal of the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes 32 (1969): 200–227, esp. 210–11. 4 3. J. R. Verellen, “Ste. Woutruyden Ommegang, te Herentals,” Oudheid en Kunst 35 (1952): 55–59, esp. 56, 58. 4 4. Van Kampen et al. 1980, p. 71, lines 178–87; the editors (p. 70) suggest that the

notes to pages 129–131

5. 4 46. 47.

4 8. 9. 4 50. 51.

52.

53.

205

war is the Gelders War, 1527–28, financed by Antwerp. Cf. a song in a ­songbook first published in Frankfurt in 1580: a beautiful young widow, her husband killed in the wars, offers herself to a dashing, young, and noble huntsman passing through the forest. After an account of the resultant romantic interlude in figurative but erotically charged language, the song concludes by advising that with so few men left after the war, now is the time for all young fellows to go after the young women, because “seven women shall battle over one pair of breeches.” See Das Ambraser Liederbuch vom Jahr 1582, ed. Joseph Bergmann (Stutt­ gart, 1845; Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1962), pp. 139–41, song cxxiii. Lebeer 1939–40, p. 214. Hollstein 1954–, 5:15, no. 96. Lebeer 1939–40, pp. 214–15, ill. p. 177; see Maarten de Vos, complied by Christiaan Schuckman and ed. D. de Hoop Scheffer, in Hollstein 1949–, 44:256, no. 1282, the inscription “M. De Vos invenit” added in the second state; the first state ill. in ibid., 46:159. It appears to be one of a set of four satirical subjects and a title plate (ibid., 44:255–56 and 46: 158–60, nos. 1280–82). Two subjects comment on the vanity and pride of women, while the third depicts the so-called egg dance. However, Schaeps 1994, p. 272, doubts, and I think correctly, that the Seven Women Battling for the Breeches originally formed a series with the first two prints. For the significance of the codpiece in sixteenth-century Europe, see Gibson 2006, pp. 98–100. Woordenboek 1882–1998, s.v. “Voerder II.” I am greatly indebted to Samuel Y. Edgerton for the translation of this inscription. John Lemprière, Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary of Proper Names Mentioned in the Ancient Authors Writ Large, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 518–19; Charles Russell Coulter and Patricia Turner, eds., Encyclopedia of Ancient Gods (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2000), pp. 389–90. Ancient accounts of Priapus are conveniently summarized in Conti’s ­Mythologiae, first published in 1567; see Natale Conti’s Mythologiae, trans. and ed. John Mulryan and Steven Brown, 2 vols., Medieval and Renaissance Text and Studies, vol. 316 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), 1:435– 37. For depictions of Priapus in ancient art, see John R. Clarke, Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 B.C.–A.D. 250 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 184–89. See Ovid in Six Volumes, vol. 5, Fasti, trans. James George Frazer, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, 1976), pp. 30–33 (1:415–40) and 342–45 (6:331–48) respectively. That Priapus was clearly one of the minor deities is suggested not only by his ­amorous failures but also by his large phallus, an attribute with which the ancient Greek artists often endowed slaves and other less respectable males; see Timothy J. McNiven, “The Unheroic Penis: Otherness Exposed,” Source: Notes in the History of Art 15, no. 1 (Fall 1995): 10–16. My thanks to Jenifer Neils for this reference. Virgil 1999, 2:509–17: “Priapea” in the Appendix Virgiliana. For the attribution of

206

5 4. 55.

56.

57. 5 8. 59.

60.

notes to page 131

the Priapea, see Wind 1948, p. 32 n. 13. For the literary fortunes of Priapus and the Priapea in the Renaissance, see ibid., pp. 28–33; David Rutherford, Early Renais­ sance Invective and the Controversies of Antonio da Rio, Renaissance Society of A ­ merica, MRTS, vol. 301, Renaissance Text Series, vol. 19 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), pp. 29–30 and passim. There were actually two groups of ancient Priapea, the smaller group in the Appendix Vergiliana and a larger group of some eighty poems (Wind 1948, p. 32 n. 12). Virgil 1999, 2:514–15, line 9 (4.9). Juvenal, Satires 6:314–27; see Juvenal and Persius, trans. Susanna Morton Braund, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 260–63. A brief reference to these mysteries appears in Erasmus 1982– 2006, 33:270 (II v 66). Erasmus 1982–2006, 31:86–87 (I i 35) and 33:262 (II v 47) respectively. In the first reference Erasmus alludes to a passage in the pseudo-Virgilian Priapea ­apparently belonging to the larger group, as it does not occur in Virgil 1999. For other references to Priapus, see ibid., 32:118 (I viii 85), 33:315 (II vi 47), and 34:303 (III iii 63). Indeed, as Erasmus’s Dame Folly tells us, “What endless jokes are provided by Priapus, that worthless fig-wood puppet” (ErasmusMiller 1979, p. 27). Perhaps Erasmus encountered the Priapea in its first critical edition (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1514); see Wind 1948, p. 32. But like most humanists, he rejected their traditional attribution to Virgil; see Erasmus 1982–2006, 35:37 (III iv 58, n. 4). Priapus was known in the Middle Ages: a thirteenth-century text identifies a bronze figure of the Spinario, a nude boy pulling a thorn from his foot, as “Priapus”; the statue was presumably placed on a column, because the writer adds: “if you lean forward and look up to see what he is doing, you discover genitals of extraordinary size.” See Master Gregorius, The Marvels of Rome, trans. John Osborne (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of ­Medieval Studies, 1987), p. 23, commentary, pp. 53–54. Erasmus 1982–2006, 31:26. Elsewhere (31: 450 [I v 74]), Erasmus describes how writers can invent a type of hyperbolic expression, such as “On a man-mad woman: ‘This woman’s appetite would not be sated by Priapus in person’ .” See Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Early Italian Engravings from the National Gallery of Art, 1973, cat. by Jay A. Levenson, Konrad Oberhuber, and Jacquelyn L. Shee­han, p. 348, fig. 17–6, and pp. 356–59, no. 136. Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomacchia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream, trans. Joscelyn Goodwin (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), pp. 193–95, esp. 195. For this text and the Priapus woodcut, see Fritz Saxl, “Pagan Sacrifice in the Italian Renaissance,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 2 (1939–40): 346–67, esp. 359–62. For this painting and Priapus’s role in it, see Wind 1948, pp. 27–35; John Walker, Bellini and Titian at Ferrara (London: Phaidon, 1956), pp. 5–15; Philip P. Fehl, ­Decorum and Wit: The Poetry of Venetian Painting; Essays in the History of the Classical ­Tradition (Vienna: IRSA, 1992), pp. 51–58, who proposes that Bellini’s textual source was not the Latin Ovid but a fourteenth-century moralized adaptation of his Metamorphoses printed at Venice in 1497.

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207

61. The Antwerp “Priapus” may originally have resembled one of the megaphallic figures or their female equivalents that are still to be seen above gates and else­ where in medieval architecture and perhaps having an apotropaic or ­prophylactic function. See Anthony Weir and James Jerman, Images of Lust: Sexual Carvings on Medieval Churches (London: Routledge, 1986), pp. 91–99; Eamon Kelly, “Irish Sheela-na-gigs and Related Figures with Reference to the Collections of the National Museum of Ireland,” in McDonald 2006, pp. 124–37. 62. See Lampo 1989, p. 55; see also Berthe Rantz, “ ‘Semini’: Un anguipede galloromain à Anvers?” Jaarboek van de Koninklijke Oudheidkundige Kring van Antwerpen 29 (1958): 33–69 (which was unavailable to me); Rantz 1986. I am much indebted to Nancy Kay and A. Monballieu for valuable information and bibliography on this subject. 63. Guicciardini 1567, p. 111. 6 4. Lampo 1989, pp. 55–56. 65. Judocus Sincerus, Itinerarium Galliae (1629), cited by Lampo 1989, p. 59. 66. Jones 2002, pp. 29–31. 67. Guicciardini 1567, p. 96. 68. Prims 1927–49, 1:26. At least one other prepuce was thought to be Christ’s; the chapter of the Golden Legend for the Feast of the Circumcision includes an account of a Holy Foreskin that was enshrined in Aachen and later in a church at Rome; see Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1:77. 69. Guicciardini 1567, p. 96. Lampo 1989, p. 57, in passing also mentions the holy relic in connection with the Antwerp “Priapus” sculpture. For further ­information on the Sacred Prepuce, its cult, and the guild charged with its care, see Prims 1927–49, 9:178, 15:118–28, 18:124–26. Although the various old ­accounts differ in detail, the relic apparently disappeared during the religious troubles of 1566. The confraternity continued for some years thereafter, ­commissioning a stained-glass window in the north transept of the church, dated 1615 and depicting the Circumcision. See J. van den Nieuwenhuizen, Gids voor de Kathedraal van Antwerpen (Antwerp, 1957), p. 79. My warmest thanks to Zirka Filipczak for this reference. For further information, see W. Aerts, ed., The ­Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp (Antwerp: Mercatorfonds, 1993), pp. 34–35, 103, a reference for which I am much indebted to Diane Scillia. 70. Pronstelcatie  .  .  . van Meester Malfus Knollebol (Antwerp: Weduwe van Jacob van Liesveldt, 1561), which speaks of the conjunction of the planets, “So vind ick dat Venus sal sijn ontrent Priapus’ habitatie, en Mars sal nu hebben cleyn domi­ natie”; see Van Kampen et al. 1980, p. 83, lines 18–19, and p. 82 n. to line 18. 7 1. Rantz 1986. 72. Ibid., pp. 249–51, who calls the obtaining of power from the Priapus image an “astonishing practice,” given its elevated placement over the gate; Lampo 1989. 73. Maurits de Meyer, “ ‘Die Blauwe Huyck’: La Cape Bleue de Jean van ­Doetinchem, datée 1577,” Proverbium: Bulletin d’information sur les recherches parémiologiques 16 (1971): 564–75; Nalis 1998, 3:224–28, no. 790 with ill. Doetinchem, more

208

74. 75. 76.

7 7.

7 8. 79. 8 0. 8 1. 2. 8 83. 84. 85. 86.

87.

8. 8 89.

notes to pages 133–138

­ sually spelled Doetecum, left Antwerp sometime in the mid-1570s and by 1577 u seems to have been in Kalkar, Germany (ibid., 1:xix). See Lebeer 1939–40, pp. 200–201, no. 33; the Battle for the Breeches appears also on an anonymous Blau Huicke print; see ibid., pp. 186–87, ill. p. 173. For copies and variants after Hogenberg, see also Brednich 1975. “Seven Women Battling for the Breeches” is listed as a proverbial expression without further comment in Woordenboek 1882–1998, s.v. “Broek I.” This print is one in a series of thirty-six proverbs, sixteen proverbs to a sheet, probably the series mentioned in a stock list made in 1681 by the Amsterdam print seller Claes Claesz Visscher II; see Hollstein 1949–, 38:22, no. 347. See also Philipp Ackermann, Textfunktion und Bild in Genreszenen der niederländischen Graphik des 17. Jahrhunderts (Alfter: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissen­ schaften, 1993), pp. 80 and 222, fig. 22, inscribed “Pieter Hendricks Schut” (etcher?); Ackermann dates it to the second quarter of the seventeenth century. In a sixteenth-century banquet play, A Drunken Man and His Wife, the husband refuses to obey his wife, “even if she was one of the seven wives who kept the devil lying on the pillow” (Veelderhande 1971, p. 7; cited by Marijnissen and Seidel 1984, p. 38, no. 1). See Gibson 2006, p. 130. Van Vaeck 1994, 3:741–43. The print was engraved by Caspar Isaac and published by Rombout van den Hoeije, Amsterdam; see Hollstein 1949–, 9:230, no. 31; Van Vaeck 1994, 3:741– 42 and 870, fig. 5; Amsterdam 1997, pp. 36–37 and fig. 85. A similar allusion to Isaiah 4:1 occurs in a Dutch poem of 1628 cited in Van Vaeck 1994, 3:741. Ibid., 2:557 (facsimile p. 241). Ibid., 2:555–58, lines 6875–926 (facsimile pp. 239–42). For a summary of these episodes, see ibid., 3:639–41 (Situatie 24–30). Laurens J. Bol, Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne: Painter and Draughtsman (Doornspijk: DAVACO, 1989), pp. 133 and 134, fig. 127, there listed as in a private collection. For this painting, see Zirka Z. Filipczak, Hot Dry Men, Cold Wet Women: The Theory of Humors in Western Art, 1575–1700 (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1997), pp. 136–37, no. 46, with color ill. Bol, Adriaen van de Venne, p. 133, ­mentions another painting of this subject, which he attributes to Van de Venne, in the Gemäldegalerie, Pommersfelden. Metken 1996, p. 108, illustrates the same or a similar picture. See Ertz 1988/2000, 2:969, no. A1428, with ill. Ertz notes that the landscape is closer to Brueghel’s style than the figures are. To my knowledge, the picture was last recorded with Paris, Galliera, 7 December 1973, lot 22, color ill. on the catalogue cover. Lebeer 1939–40, p. 209, no. 33. Metken 1996, p. 103 with ill.; inscribed below, “Hier vechten seven wyven om een mans broeck”; impression in Ghent, Museum voor Volkskunde. One final seventeenth-century Dutch version is recorded, a drawing attributed to Pieter

notes to pages 139–143

9 0. 1. 9 92. 93. 94.

9 5. 9 6.

209

Quast; see A. van Stolk, Atlas van Stolk: Katalogus der historie-, spot- en zinneprenten ­betrekkelijk de geschiedenis van Nederland, ed. G. van Rijn and C. van Ommeren, 10 vols. (Amsterdam: Frederik Muller en Co., 1895–1933), 2:313, no. 2129. Its present location is unknown to me. Metken 1996, pp. 96–137, offers a valuable survey of this subject down to the end of the nineteenth century. Ibid., p. 105, ill. p. 106. De Bry-Kemp 1994, no. 42. In another emblem in De Bry’s volume (ibid., no. 51 and p. 47, verse no. LI), a commentary on how women evaluate potential suitors, a young woman ­similarly sifts a man through a sieve. William A. Coupe, The German Illustrated Broadsheet in the Seventeenth Century: Historical and Iconographical Studies, 2 vols., Bibliotheca Bibliographica Aureliana 17 (Baden-Baden: Verlag Librairie Heitz, 1966–67), 1:52, 196, 2:265, no. 298; Wolfgang Harms, Michael Schilling, and Andreas Wang, eds., Die Sammlung der Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel: Kommentierte Ausgabe, 3 vols., Deutsche ­illustrierte Flugblätter des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts,, ed. Wolfgang Harms (Munich: Kraus International Publications et al., 1980–89), 1:306–7, with ill. Personal communication from Professor Jones, who will publish the print in a book now in press on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English prints. Metken 1996, p. 135, with ill. She dates it to the 1870s.

conclusion. figures of fun and folly Epigraphs: Stijevoort 1930, 2:61–63, no. clxv (cf. Frank and Miner 1937, p. 54, no. lxviii); and Job van der Wael, Sonder ons Zotkens hier, wie zoud ’t volc vermaken? the title of a refrein in ’t zot published in 1619, quoted from Coigneau 1980–83, 1:190. 1. More-Miller 2001, pp. 51–135. A recent study is Dominic Baker-Smith, More’s Utopia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the Renais­ sance Society of America, 2000). As Baker-Smith emphasizes (pp. 209–10), More does not always agree with what he sees in Utopian society but concludes that it has many features “which it is easier for me to wish for in our countries than to have any hope of seeing realized.” 2. More-Miller 2001, p. 76. 3. In the preface to Ortensio Lando’s 1548 translation of Utopia; see Eric Nelson, “Utopia through Italian Eyes: Thomas More and the Critics of Italian Humanism,” Renaissance Quarterly 59, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 1029–57, esp. 1049. For a modern, perhaps more realistic assessment see Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Sir Thomas More and Utopia,” in idem, Renaissance Essays (Chicago: University of Chi­ cago Press, 1985), pp. 24–57, esp. 40–48. 4. More-Miller 2001, p. 101; see also p. 159 n. 230 for Miller’s interpretation of this passage. 5. “Proverbial expressions and trite sayings,” Chesterfield continues, “are the ­flowers of the rhetoric of a vulgar man.” If “you let off a proverb,” he writes on

210

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

1 1. 12.

1 3. 1 4.

notes to pages 143–145

another occasion, “and say, That what is one man’s meat is another man’s poison; or else, Everyone as they like, as the good man said when he kissed the cow, everybody would be persuaded that you had never kept company with anybody above footmen and housemaids.” Quoted from letters of 1741 and 1749, in Wolfgang Mieder, “ ‘A Man of Fashion Never Has Recourse to Proverbs’: Lord Chesterfield’s Tilting at Proverbial Windmills,” in Strategies of Wisdom: Anglo-American and German Proverb Studies, ed. Mieder, Phraseologie und Parömiologie, Band 6 (Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag Hohengehren, 2000), pp. 36–68, esp. 38–40. However, Mieder also notes that Chesterfield employed proverbs and proverbial expressions in his own writing, albeit none of the “vulgar” sort. Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, intro. and notes by Amy M. King (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005), p. 634; cf. pp. 317–18 for a similar warning. However, in contrast to Chesterfield, Gaskell thus contrasts the spurious ­gentility of Mrs. Gibson with the genuineness of the stepdaughter’s character. Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversation (1737), foreword by Toby Litt (London: ­Hesperus Press, 2007). See Obelkevich 1987, pp. 57–61; Mieder 1993, pp. 25–29; Mieder and Sobieski 2006. On the decline of proverbs in modern writing, see Obelkevich 1987, pp. 57–59. For the emergence of new proverbs from old ones, see Anna T. Litovikina and Wolfgang Mieder, Old Proverbs Never Die, They Just Diversify: A Collection of AntiProverbs (Burlington: University of Vermont; Veszprém: Pannonian University of Veszprém, 2006). See, e.g., Peacock 1999, p. 15, fig. 2. See Mieder and Sobieski 1999, index; partial lists given in Pigler 1974, 2:575 (“Der zerbrochener Krug”) and pp. 591–92. See further I. Németh, “Het spreekwoord ‘Zo d’ouden zongen, zo pijpen de jongen’ in schilderijen van Jacob Jordaens en Jan Steen: Motieven en associaties,” Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, Jaarboek 1990, pp. 271–86; Roger Adolph d’Hulst, Jacob Jor­ daens, trans. P. S. Falle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 365, s.v. “Proverbs”: “As the old sing, so the young pipe”; Kristi Nelson, Jacob Jordaens: Design for Tapestry, Pictura Nova 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, c. 1998), pp. 103–17, nos. 26–34. Cudden 1999, p. 707. For one such play and its literary context, see La comédie de proverbes: Pièce comique d’après l’édition princeps de 1633, ed. and intro. Michael Kramer (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2003). See Wolfgang Mieder, “Tilting at Windmills”: History and Meaning of a Proverbial Allusion to Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” (Burlington: University of Vermont, 2006); Wolfgang Mieder, “History and Interpretation of a Proverb about Human Nature: Big Fish Eat Little Fish,” in idem, Tradition and Innovation in Folk Literature (Hanover, NH: University Presses of New England for the University of Vermont, 1993), pp. 178–228; Mieder 2004a, pp. 34–43. See also Kevin J. McKenna, “Pro­

notes to pages 145–150

15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 2 0. 2 1. 22. 23.

2 4.

25.

211

paganda and the Proverb: ‘Big Fish Eat Little Fish’ in Pravda Political Cartoons,” Proverbium 17 (2000): 217–42. For depictions of this proverb in earlier ­European art, see Gerd Unverfehrt, “Christliches Exempel und profane Allegorie: Zum Verhältnis von Wort und Bild in der Graphik der Boschnachfolge,” in Vekeman and Müller-Hofstede 1984, pp. 221–41, esp. 229–36. Bastian Scherbeck, “The Proverb World of Thom E. Breitenbach: An Analysis of Proverbidioms,” Proverbium 24 (2007): 335–67. Posters after this and other ­proverb pictures by the artist can be seen on the Internet using the keyword “Thom B. Breitenbach.” See Metken 1996. A case in point are the several prints issued by the Venetian printmaker Nelli Nicoló. They include a single sheet of 1564 depicting a ­number of proverbs; although organized in four rows instead of dispersed in a landscape, its com­prehensiveness may owe something to Hogenberg’s Blau Huicke. Nicoló followed this in 1572 by a suite of twenty-one proverb prints whose format and verses recall contemporary emblem books. See Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Mostra di stampe populari venete del ’500, 1965, ed. Anna Omodeo, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe 20, pp. 17–21, nos. 12, 13, figs. 6–17. See Vermeylen 2003. Their wide circulation throughout Europe is suggested by the many ­Netherlandish prints cited by Vasari in his Lives of the Artists; see Robert H. Getscher, An Annotated and Illustrated Version of Giorgio Vasari’s History of Italian and Northern Prints from His Lives of the Artists (1550 & 1568), 2 vols. (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), 1:208–22, 261–65. For the medieval Franciscan sermon with its emphasis on sin and guilt, see Mormando 1999, pp. 7–21. For copies and variants after Bosch, see Unverfehrt 1980. Nalis 1998, 4:6–7, no. 842. How literary motifs detatch themselves from their original contexts and lead independent lives is discussed in Curschmann 2000, pp. 35–38. See Ertz 1988/2000, 2:24–71, nos. 1–24; Rebecca Duckwitz, “The Devil Is in the Detail: Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs and Copies after It from the Workshop of Pieter Brueghel the Younger,” in Brueghel Enterprises, ed. Peter van den Brink (Ghent: Ludion, 2001), pp. 58–79. The prints derived from Hogenberg’s Blau Huicke were also copied in paintings, of which several may be mentioned here: 1. Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, ­Tableaux anciens et modernes et d’antiquités, 31 January–1 February 1949, lot 76 with ill., attributed to Jan van Mandyn; 2. Brussels, Galerie Finck, attributed to Abel Grimmer, see “Die flämischen Sprichtwörter,” Weltkunst 29, no. 10 (May 15, 1959): 11–12; 3. London, Christie’s, Old Master Pictures, 21 April 2004, lot 3, with color ill., as “Circle of Pieter Breughel II.” The publishing history of this print is unclear. Hollstein 1949–, 9:164, no. 34, describes two states: I, without inscriptions; II, with inscriptions, including “Hieronymus Bos inventor. Joan Galle escudit.” An impression of the putative

212

26.

27. 2 8. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

3 4.

35.

36.

notes to pages 150–154

first state was in London, Sotheby Parke Bernet, 16 May 1980, lot 58. The second state is presumably our Fig. 79. In a still later state, bearing the address of Joan Galle, the plate was apparently cut down at the top, a scroll bearing a new title in French inserted just below, and each figure or figure group numbered and labeled in French; see Cologne, Belgisches Haus, Wort und Bild: Buchkunst und Druckgraphik in den Niederländen im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, 1981, ed. Hans-Joachim Raupp, pp. 135– 37, no. 40. A further edition by Pieter de Jode is noted in Ilja M. Veldman, Images for the Eye and Soul: Function and Meaning in Netherlandish Prints (1450–1650) (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2006), p. 299 n. 18. The print has been attributed to both Cor­nelis Massys and Pieter Baltens, the latter by Kostyshyn 1994, 2:924–25 and fig. 243. In Van Kampen et al. 1980, pp. 90–92, lines 146–47, the accompanying note defines the expression as a synonym for sloth. Cf. Kamper spreekwoorden 1959, p. 63, line 13: Hy seeyt die strate mit eers billen (he sows the street with buttocks), initiating a group of proverbs describing laziness. The verses are transcribed in Amsterdam, Amsterdams Historisch Museum, Arm in de Gouden Eeuw, 1965, p. 18, no. 39; see also Lebeer 1939–40, pp. 220–22, Joan Galle’s edition ill. p. 211. Marijnissen and Seidel 1984, pp. 42–43, nos. 84, 75, and 81, respectively. Erasmus-Miller 1979, p. 119. For the philosophical implications of this elevated viewpoint, see Walter S. Gibson, “Mirror of the Earth”: The World Landscape in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 57–59. Niemand ooit zo klein iets spon, of het kwam wel aan de zon, that is, nothing remains ­hidden or unrequited forever. My English translation, with slight revisions, from Marijnissen and Seidel 1984, p. 43, no. 85. Rabelais-Screech 2006, pp. 944–96 (Book 5, chapter 21). The fifth book was published only after Rabelais’s death and its authenticity is uncertain. A brief but useful discussion appears in Donald M. Frame, François Rabelais: A Study (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), pp. 85–90, who concludes (p. 90) that the fifth book was written by a follower of Rabelais. These are listed in Rabelais-Screech 2006, pp. 943–94. Rabelais corresponded at least once with Erasmus, in 1531; see The Complete Works of François Rabelais, trans. Donald M. Frame, foreword by Raymond C. La Charité (Berkeley: Univer­sity of California Press, 1991), pp. 746–47 (no. 6.7: “To Bernard Salignac”). This similarity between text and picture has been noted by, among others, Wilhelm Fraenger, Der Bauern-Bruegel und das deutsche Sprichtwort (Zurich: Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1923), pp. 41–46; Alexander Wied, Bruegel, trans. Anthony Lloyd (London: Studio Vista, 1980), p. 93. Indeed, no Netherlandish translation of Pantagruel and Gargantua appeared until 1682, although the upper classes could have read it in French; see J. G. Sterck, Bronnen en samenstelling van Marnix’ Bienkorf der H. Roomsche Kercke: Bijdrage tot de studie van het godsdienstig-polemisch proza in de Nederlanden der XVIe eeuw (Louvain: Vlaamse Drukkerij, 1952), pp. 157–58. Bergson 1911, pp. 5 and 12, respectively; the italics are in the original text. See also

notes to pages 154–156

37.

38.

3 9. 40.

4 1. 4 2.

4 3.

4 4. 45.

46.

47.

213

Sigmund Freud, Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. A. A. Brill (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1916; repr. New York: Dover Publications, 1993), pp. 336–38. Andriessoon 2003, pp. 103, 210, no. 46.2. Poederoijen was originally the name of a fortified place in Guelders, notorious as the source of raids carried out in neighboring Holland, Brabant, and other Burgundian territories. From ­Poederijen also comes the expression “the house te Proyen” [thuys te Proyen], referring to an utterly dilapidated house. See Herman Pleij, De sneeuwpoppen van 1511: Literatuur en standcultuur tussen middeleeuwen en moderne tijd (Amsterdam: Meulen­ hoff; Louvain: Kritak, 1988), pp. 294–97. See Andriessoon 2003, pp. 136, 243, no. 79.7 and pp. 159, 266, no. 102.7 ­respectively. Meadow translates Lelijkendam as “Uglyville,” but I have changed it to conform with a place-name type common in the Lowlands such as ­A msterdam, Rotterdam. Kamper spreekwoorden 1959, p. 49, line 10: Hy is gants ten wtkercken. A play on “Lombardy,” a variant of this name appears in the proverb “He is from plomperdien” listed in Sartorius’s epitome of Erasmus’s Adages; see Woordenboek 1882–1998, s.v. “Plompard I,” section on “Plompardije.” Cf. Lambrecht 1945, p. 156, s.v. “Plompaert oft bottaert,” translated as Lourdault (Lourdaud in modern French), meaning “clumsy or oafish.” Comparable is Plomphuizen (Woordenboek 1882–1998, s.v. “Plomp VII”). Joldersma 1982, 1:194–95, no. clxix. Cf. “Keyenberch,” mentioned in the 1560 almanac Ulenspieghel (Van Kampen et al. 1980, p. 77, line 259, and ­accompanying note). For the stone of folly, see Van Kampen et al. 1980, p. 77, line 259, and ­accompanying note. Most familiar from Bosch’s Operation for the Stone of Folly (Madrid, Museo del Prado), the stone of folly was treated in a refrain in ­Stijevoort 1930, 1:164–66, no. 85. This popular subject needs further study, but see William Schupach, “A New Look at The Cure of Folly,” Medical History 22, no. 3 (July 1978): 267–81. The inhabitants of Keyenborch were born at Dixmuyen, or Dixmuyden, whose denizens were traditionally thought to be stupid, and they were baptized in Botterdam, a play on botter (a cheat or scoundrel) and Rotterdam (Joldersma 1982, 2:34–36, commentary for no. xvii). Dichten en spelen van Jan van den Berghe, ed. C. Kruyskamp (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1950), p. 8, lines 40–49. Pieter van der Heyden’s 1559 print after Bruegel, The Stone Operation, is also known as The Witch of Mallegem, i.e., “the Witch of ‘Crazyham’ or ‘Foolsville,’ ” based on a letterpress text added some years later; see Rotterdam-New York 2001, p. 193, no. 78. Quoted from Matthew 7:3–5; cf. Luke 6:41–42. Erasmus includes this prov­ erb in his Adages, as well as a variant, “We see not what is in the wallet behind,” taken from Aesop; see Erasmus 1982–2006, 32:59–60 (I vi 91 and I vi 90 respectively) Andriessoon 2003, pp. 115, 222, no. 58.2; De Laet 1962, p. 35, no. 594, with a second variant on p. 15, no. 246.

214

notes to page 156

4 8. Plokker 1984, p. 243, no. 104, as by Adriaen van de Venne; ill. in Amsterdam, Christie’s, Old Master Pictures, 14 May 2002, lot 65, there attributed to a follower of Van de Venne. I am grateful to Edwin Buijsen for this reference. 49. This subject merits further study, but for examples see Jones 2002, p. 170; Amsterdam 1997, pp. 22–23. Related in theme is the anonymous Head of a Jester, a German engraving executed about 1600, whose inscription alludes to the “seven fools,” presumably including the viewer; see Gregory Davies and Alison Stewart, “Head of a Jester,” Print Quarterly 19 (2002): 170–74. 50. Erasmus 1982–2006, 31:87–88 (I i 39). 5 1. See Van Eeghem 1937, p. 62, lines 304–5. The proverb is repeated in David 1606, no. 281. Cf. Kamper spreekwoorden 1959, p. 52, lines 4, 5 respectively: “We are all imperfect” and “There is no one without imperfection.” Cf. Matthew 19:17, “One is good, God.”

selected bibliography ., books and articles Agricola 1971. Agricola, Johannes. Die Sprichwörter Sammlungen. Edited by Sander L. Gilman. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Ammer 2006. Ammer, Christine. The Facts on File Dictionary of Clichés. 2nd ed. New York: Checkmark Books. Andriessoon 2003. Adriessoon, Symon. Duytsche Adagia ofte Spreecwoorden, Antwerp, Heynrick Alssens, 1550: In Facsimile, Transcription of the Dutch Text and English Translation. Edited by Mark A. Meadow and Anneke C. G. Fleurkens, with introductory texts by S. A. C. Dudok van Heel and Herman Roodenburg. Hilversum: Verloren. Appelt 1942. Appelt, Theodore Charles. Studies in the Contents and Sources of Erasmus’ “Adagia,” with Particular Reference to the First Edition of 1500 and the Edition of 1526. Chicago: Privately printed. Aristotle 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. Bollingen Series 71, parts 1, 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Atkinson 1974. Atkinson, James B. “Naïveté and Modernity: The French Renaissance Battle for a Literary Vernacular.” Journal of the History of Ideas 35, no. 2:179–96. Van Bastelaer-Gilchrist 1992. Van Bastelaer, René. Les estampes de Pierre l’ancien. Brussels: G. Van Oost & Co., 1908. Translated and revised by Susan Fargo Gilchrist as The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Catalogue Raisonné; New Edition. San Francisco: Alan Wolfsky Fine Arts. Bax 1949. Bax, Dirk. Ontcijfering van Jeroen Bosch. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1949. For English translation, see Bax 1979. ——— 1956. Beschrijving en poging tot verklaring van het tuin der onkuisheiddrieluik van Jeroen Bosch gevolgd door kritiek op Fraenger. Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, afd. Letterkunde, nieuwe reeks, deel 63, no. 2. Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij. ——— 1979. Hieronymus Bosch: His Picture-Writing Deciphered. Translated by N. A. Bax Botha. Rotterdam: A. A. Balkema.

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Du Bellay 2006. Du Bellay, Joachim. The Regrets with The Antiquities of Rome, Three Latin Elegies, and The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language: A Bilingual Edition. Edited and translated by Richard Helgerson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bergson 2005. Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. 1911. Translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. New York: Macmillian Company. Reprint. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Van Beuningen and Koldeweij 1993. Van Beuningen, H. J. E., and A. M. Koldeweij, eds. Heilig en Profaan: 1000 Laatmiddeleeuwse Insignes uit de collectie H. J. E. van Beuningen. Rotterdam Papers 8. Cothen: Stichting Middeleeuwse Religieuze en Profane Insignes. Bijns 1875. Bijns, Anna. Refereinen van Anna Bijns. Edited by W. L. van Helten. 2 vols. Rotterdam: J. H. Dunk. Von Boehn 1932–37. Von Boehn, Max. Modes and Manners. Translated by Joan Joshua. 4 vols. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott. Bonne response 1960. Bonne response à tous propos (1547): Édition en fac-simile. Paris: Arnoul l’Angelier, 1547. Edited by G. G. Kloeke. Verhandelingen der Konin­ klijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, afd. Letterkunde, Nieuwe reeks, deel 68, no. 1. Amsterdam: N. V. Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij. Borst 1957–63. Borst, Arno. Der Turmbau von Babel: Geschichte der Meinungen über Ursprung und Vielfalt der Sprachen und Völker. 4 vols. in 6 pts. Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann. Bowen 1974. Bowen, Barbara C. “Le théatre du cliché.” Cahiers de l’A ssociation internationale des études françaises (CAIEF) 26:33–47. ——— 1998. Enter Rabelais, Laughing. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Bradbury 2008. Bradbury, Nancy Mason. “Rival Wisdom in the Latin Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf.” Speculum 83, no. 2:331–65. Van den Branden 1967. Van den Branden, L. Het streven naar verheerlijking, zuivering en opbouw van het Nederlands in de 16de eeuw. Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal- en Letterkunde, reeks 6, nr. 77. Arnhem: Gysbers en Van Loon. Brant-Zeydel 1962. Brant, Sebastian. The Ship of Fools. Translated by Edwin H. Zeydel. New York: Dover Publications. Brednich 1975. Brednich, Rolf Wilh. “Die Holländisch-Flämischen Sprichworterbildbilder­bogen vom Typus ‘De Blauwe Huyck.’ ” In Miscellanea Prof. Em. Dr. K. C. Peeters. Edited by W. Van Nespen, pp. 120–31. Antwerp: C. Govaert. De Bruyn 2001. De Bruyn, Eric. De vergeten beeldentaal van Jheronimus Bosch: De symboliek van de Hooiwagen-triptiek en de Rotterdamse Marskramer-tondo verklaard van uit Middlelnederlandse teksten. ’s-Hertogenbosch: Adr. Heinen. De Bry-Kemp 1994. De Bry, Johann Theodor. Emblemata Secularia. With an after­ word by Cornelia Kemp. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag. Callahan 1973. Callahan, Virginia Woods. “The Erasmus-Alciati Friendship.” In Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Lovaniensis: Proceedings of the First International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, Louvain 23–28 August 1971, edited by J. Ijsewijn and E. Kessler,

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index ., Aertsen, Pieter, 200n116 Agricola, Johannes: Gemyener Sprichwörter (Common Proverbs), 11, 12–13, 15 Alberti, Leon Battista, 4 Alciati, Andrea: Emblematum Liber, 111 Al Hoy (Crabeth drawing), 63, 64 fig. Al Hoy (Frans Hogenberg), 56–58, 57fig., 69, 73–74, 76, 89, 102, 147 Al Hoy (Horenbault engraving), 73fig., 74 Al Hoy (play by de Smet), 73 Alssens, Hendrick, 12 Altdorfer, Albrecht, 27 Alva, duke of, 51, 52, 56, 62, 180n51 Andriessoon, Symon, 20, 33, 94, 154, 156; Duytsche Adagia ofte spreecwoorden (Dutch Adages or Proverbs), 12, 97, 106; hay symbol­ ism and, 43, 71 Antwerp: early proverb collections from, 11–13; Elck (Everyman) procession of 1563 in, 37, 57–58, 62, 72, 94; emblem books and, 109; Landjuweel of 1561, 32, 70, 72, 94, 106, 109; mock New Year’s prognos­ tications and, 60; Priapus relief in, 131– 33, 132fig., 207n61; Violieren chamber of, 31–32, 33–35, 34 fig., 70 Antwerp Songbook (1544), 122 Apostolius, Michael, 4 “archer” motif, 91–93, 92fig., 115, 190n25 Aristotle, 6 asinus ad lyram (ass at the lyre), 21

Barnouw, Adriaan J., 105 Battle for the Breeches (anonymous 17th century etching), 134, 135fig., 137 Battle for the Breeches (Brueghel the Younger painting), 138, 139fig. Battle for the Breeches (de Bry), 140fig. Battle for the Breeches (engraving from Emblemata Saecularia), 140fig. Battle for the Breeches (images by Van de Venne), 135–38, 136fig., 138fig., 140 Battle for the Breeches motif: eighteenth century images and, 138–41; fewer than seven women and, 124–25; Hogenberg’s Blau Huicke print and, 133, 137, 138; Isaiah 4:1 as text and, 118–26; in marital con­ text, 104 fig., 120; as medieval visual theme, 119–26; proverbial depictions of, 133–41; scriptural reference for, 118– 22; sixteenth-century images and, 126– 33; twelve women and, 124. See also entries at Struggle for the Breeches Baude, Henri, 27 Bebel, Heinrich: Proverbia Germanica (German Proverbs), 11 Becanus, Joannes Goropius, 166n105; Origines Antwerpianae (Origins of Antwerp), 16; phallic imagery and, 131–32 Bellay, Joachin du: La Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Françoyse (The Defense and Enrichment of the French Language), 14–15 Bellini, Giovanni, 131 Berghe, Jan van den: Het leenhof der gilden, 155 Bergson, Henri, 154, 167n6

Baker-Smith, Dominic, 209n1 Baldass, Ludwig von, 181n71 Baltens, Pieter, 212n25

229

230

biblical texts: book of Isaiah, 38, 118; book of Proverbs, 6, 7–8; book of Psalms, 22– 24, 25fig.; Isaiah 4:1, 118–26, 148; Isaiah 40:6, 40–41, 112; John 14:2, 46; Matthew 7:6, 3; Matthew 13:13, 94; Matthew 15:14, 88; Matthew 16:26, 45; Psalm 102:15, 40–41 bierbisschop (“beer bishop”), 97 Bijns, Anna, 33, 90, 183n87 Die Blau Huicke (Frans Hogenberg), 35– 37, 36fig., 55–56, 86–87, 133, 138, 146; Bruegel and, 35–37, 149–52; copied as paintings, 211n24 Die Blau Huicke (Galle), 133–34, 134 fig. “blind leading the blind” motif, 88–90, 89fig., 90fig., 112 “blue cloak” motif, 2–3, 27, 173n82. See also Die Blau Huicke (Frans Hogenberg) Bol, Hans, 89 Bonne response à tous propos (French collection), 12 books of hours, 21, 22fig., 28 Booth, George, 144 Borst, Arno, 17 Bosch, Hieronymus, 38, 89, 179n42; Christ Crowned with Thorns, 54; The Field Has Eyes, the Woods Have Ears, 39, 40fig.; Garden of Earthly Delights, 49, 50, 51, 52, 147; Proverbs on Sloth (anonymous) and, 146, 151fig.; St. John on Patmos, 54; surviving copies of works by, 147; tapestries inspired by, 50– 55. See also Haywain (Bosch triptych) Bouvelles, Charles de, 14; Proverbium Vulgarium, 11 Brant, Sebastian, 151; Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools), 24 Braun, Augustin, 201n13 Breitenbach, Thom: Proverbidioms, 145 Breu, Jorg, the Elder, 24; Milking the Ears, 24–25, 26fig., 169n34 Bruegel the Elder, Pieter: Battle of the Savings Pots and Money Chests (engraving), 70, 71fig.; Big Fish Eat the Little Fish, 3, 35, 67, 68fig., 70; The Blind Leading the Blind, 4, 88, 90fig., 153; Boschian subjects by, 67; Dulle Griet, 134; Elck drawing, 3, 70–72, 72fig., 75, 114, 146, 186n122; Falling between Two Stools, 1, 3fig., 81, 85fig.; The Misanthrope, 4, 81, 86, 87, 88fig.; Netherlandish Proverbs, 1–3, 5, 9,

index

21, 23, 35–37, 134, 149–56; The Peasant and the Nest Robber, 4, 81, 148; rederijkers and, 31, 32, 35; Twelve Proverbs of, 3–4, 27, 29fig., 81, 85fig.; Wedding Banquet, 104; Wierix’s Twelve Proverbs images and, 80– 81, 85fig., 86–96, 88fig, 90fig, 96fig. See also Netherlandish Proverbs (Bruegel the Elder) Brueghel the Younger, Pieter: Battle for the Breeches, 138, 139fig. Brun, Franz: Struggle for the Breeches (engraving), 128fig., 129 Bry, Johann Theodor de: Battle for the Breeches (engraving), 140fig.; Emblemata Saecularia, 112–17, 114 fig., 115fig., 116fig., 139–40 Bry, Theodor de, 200n111 Calvete de Estrella, Juan Christóbal, 131, 133 Castelein, Mathias de, 104 Cats, Jacob, 112 The Celestina (1491 Spanish picaresque novel), 7, 10 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote, 7 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 194n56; Canterbury Tales, 7, 102–3 Chesterfield, Lord. See Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth Earl of Chesterfield A Choice of Emblemes (Whitney), 109, 110fig. Christ, 6–7, 11, 155–56 Cleve, Marten van, 60–61 “cloak to the wind” motif, 23, 25fig. Cluvier, Philipp, 17 Cock, Hieronymus, 35, 81, 145; Boschian themes and, 67–68, 70 Coloniensis, Bartholomaeus, 14 Colonna, Francesco, 131 Corrozet, Gilles: Hecatomgraphie, 111 Crabeth, Adriaen Pietersz, 147; Al Hoy drawing, 63, 64 fig. Cramer, Daniel, 187n137 Crul, Cornelis, 196n78 Dale, Jan van den: De Ure van ons dood (The Hour of Our Death), 41 David, Johannes: collection of rhymed proverbs by, 73 David (Hebrew king), 22

index

de’ Barbari, Jacopo, 131 “deceit” motif: blue cloak imagery and, 2–3, 27, 36–37, 173n82; eyeglasses and, 94; peddler imagery and, 93–94, 93fig.; Peddler Seated by the Bride (Twelve Proverbs, Wierix), 104–6, 105fig.; relics and, 180n57 De Eglentier Chamber of Amsterdam, 32 Deguilleville, Guillaume de, 41; Pélerinage de la vie humaine, 43 Dene, Eduard de, 158n9 Diomedes, 18 Distichs of Cato (medieval collection), 8 Doesborch, Jan van, 33, 173n81 Doetecum, Joannes van, 133, 147 Doni, Anton Francesco, 143 Drincatibus, St. (St. Drink), 97 Drunken Peasant Pushed into a Pigsty (Wierix), 60, 81, 84 fig. El Escorial triptych, 46, 49, 50 Eliot, John, 166n106 emblem books, 109–12, 110fig., 113, 144; Emblemata Saecularia (de Bry) and, 112–17, 114 fig., 115fig., 116fig., 139–40 Erasmus, Desiderius (“father of proverbs”), 6, 8–11, 28, 185n112, 190n23; Adages (Ada­ giorum Collectecteana; Adagiorum Chiliades), 9–11, 22, 145, 148; antimendicant senti­ ment and, 196n78; conception of the proverb and, 9–11; Dame Folly and, 107– 8, 151; De Ratione Studii (On the Method of Study), 25; emblem books and, 111, 112; The Feast of Many Courses, 103; The Godly Feast, 25, 27; greed and, 70; Latin literary sources and, 9–11, 14; Praise of Folly, 107– 8; Priapus and, 131; relations between the sexes motifs and, 100, 104, 118, 128, 131, 206n56 Estienne, Henri: Précellence da la langage français (Preeminence of the French Language), 15 Everaert, Cornelis, 69, 102 Every Merchant Praises His Own Wares (Emble­ mata Saecularia, de Bry), 115fig., 116 Every Merchant Praises His Own Wares (Twelve Proverbs, Wierix), 93fig., 94, 112 eyghenbaet (selfishness), 68–70, 75–77, 79. See also “greed” motif

231

fable proverb, 5 factie (satirical play), 106 “the father of proverbs.” See Erasmus, Desiderius (“the father of proverbs”) Félibien, André, 51 Flötner, Peter: Mock Religious Procession (woodcut), 122, 122fig. fools, 171n62; Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs, 149–56; cats and, 23–24; Drunken Fool Seated on an Egg (Twelve Proverbs, Wierix), 97–98, 97fig., 112, 192n41; rederijkers and, 33–35, 34 fig. See also human folly Fountain of Youth, 124 Francis I, king of France: “five tapestries of the devys de Híeronyme” and, 50–52, 180n52; “Mirror of Princes” manuscript and, 22 Franck, Sebastian, 15; Sprichwörter, 11 Franckaert, Hans, 31 French manuscripts (fifteenth century), 21–22, 24 fig. friendship albums, 113 “froward maidens” motif: The Hay Chasing the Horse (Twelve Proverbs, Wierix) and, 98–101, 100fig. Galle, Johannes: Die Blau Huicke (engraving), 133, 134 fig. “gape before the oven” motif, 21, 23fig. Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais), 19, 108, 153–54 Gaskell, Elizabeth: Wives and Daughters, 143 Gheurtsz, Reyer, 32 giericheyt (avarice), 68–70, 75–77, 79. See also “greed” motif “gifts of enemies are no gifts,” 162n62 Gilles van Diest, Marcus Antonius, 111 Godefroid de Bouillon, 132 Goedthals, François, 37, 94, 102; Proverbes anciens flamengs et françois correspondants, 12–13 Granvelle, archbishop of Malines, 51, 52, 180n54 Grauls, Jan, 98, 105 “greed” motif: forms of avarice and, 43–46; hay allegories and, 56, 63, 68–70, 72–79; opportunism and, 90–91, 91fig. See also Haywain (Bosch triptych) Gregory the Great, Pope, 45

232

Groeijende Boom Chamber of Lier, 106 Guevara, Felipe de, 49, 178n35 Guicciardini, Lodovico, 131, 132 Gymnick (Gymnicus), Jan, 15–16 Haecht, Godevaert van, 108 Haecht, Willem van, 32, 108, 111 Hameel, Alart du: St. Christopher and the Christ Child, 54 Hansen, William, 5 “hay” (al hoy) motif: al hoy as phrase and, 41; hay allegories unrelated to Bosch and, 62–67, 64 fig., 65fig., 66fig.; Hay Chasing the Horse (Twelve Proverbs, Wierix), 98–101, 100fig.; seventeenth century allegories and, 72–79; sixteenth century popularity of, 67–72; symbolism of, 39–49; turnips and, 58–62, 59fig., 74, 75–77, 147. See also Al Hoy (Frans Hogenberg); Haywain (Bosch triptych) Hay Allegory (ca. 1550), 62–63, 64 fig. Haywain (Bosch triptych), 39–49, 41fig.; central panel of, 42fig.; contemporary audience for, 49–50; dating of, 178n33; Eden panel, 46, 47fig.; El Escorial triptych, 46, 49, 50; etchings inspired by, 55–62; Frans Hogenberg’s Al Hoy and, 55–58, 57fig.; hay symbolism and, 39–39, 147; Hell panel, 46, 47fig.; Madrid tapestry and, 52–55, 53fig.; message of, 146–47, 149, 151, 153; outer wings, 46, 48fig., 49; serious message of, 146–47; tapestry cartoon inspired by, 50–55, 53fig. Heemskerck, Maerten van, 114, 173n76 Heere, Lucas de, 16 Hendrik III, count of Nassau, 49 He Who Would Make His Way through the World Must Bend (Netherlandish painting), 27– 28, 30fig. Heyden, Michiel van der, 70 Heyden, Pieter van der, 80–81, 89 Heywood, John: A Dialogue Containing in Effect the Number of All the Proverbs in the English Tongue, 8 Hogenberg, Frans, 156; Al Hoy, 56–58, 57fig., 69, 73–74, 76, 89, 102, 147; Die Blau Huicke, 35–37, 36fig., 86–87, 133, 146, 149–52; Struggle for the Breeches, 126–30, 127fig., 204n40

index

Hogenberg, Remigius, 62; The Peasant in the Tavern, 61, 106; The Turnip Wagon, 58–62, 59fig., 147 Horenbault, Jacques: Al Hoy (engraving), 73fig., 74 Hours of Mary of Burgundy, 94 human folly: Bosch’s Haywain triptych and, 39–49, 41fig., 42fig., 45fig., 47fig.; Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs and, 149–56; Frans Hogenberg’s Al Hoy print and, 56–58, 57fig.; Remigius Hogenberg’s Turnip Wagon etching and, 58–62, 59fig. See also “hay” (al hoy) motif Husband Surrendering His Breeches to His Wife (anonymous 1555 woodcut), 103, 104 fig. Indestege, Luc, 169n25 In Liefd Bloyende Chamber of Amsterdam, 32 Innocent III, Pope, 102 It Is All Hay (Frans Pourbus drawing), 65– 67, 66fig. Jansz, Lauris: Het Cooren (play), 69 Jerome, Saint, 118 Jeurken (fool), 33, 72 Jones, Malcolm, 121–22, 140–41 Jordaens, Jacob, 144 Juvenal: Satires, 131 kaakspeler (jawbone player) motif, 35, 94– 95, 95fig., 96fig., 112, 191n33 Keyenborch (mock country), 154–55 “know thyself ” image, 71–72, 72fig. koorenbyter (“grain biter”), 56, 69 de Laet, Hans, 16, 43, 102, 156; Seer schoone spreeckwoorden (Very Beautiful Proverbs in French and Dutch), 12 Landjuweel (literary competition), 31–32, 33. See also under Antwerp Latin language, 165n97, 166n108 Laughable World. See under Venne, Adriaen van de lawyers, 143 Lebeer, Louis, 80 Leeu, Gerard, 8 Lelijkendam (mock town), 154 Liber parobolarum (Book of Proverbs), 8

index

Life of St. Andrew the Fool, 119 Lille, Alain de, 8 linguistic nationalism, 13–17, 145, 165n93, 166n105 Louis, duke of Anjou, 170n39 Luther, Martin, 33, 165n98; On Translation, 15 Madrid Haywain tapestry, 52–55, 53fig. Man Crawling through the World (R & K Hours), 21, 22fig. Den Man en’t Sotte Kint (The Man and the Foolish Child; play), 74 “man falling between two stools” motif, 22; Falling between Two Stools (Bruegel the Elder), 1, 3fig., 81, 85fig. Man Gaping against the Oven (Misericord carving), 21, 23fig. man-hungry women. See Battle for the Breeches motif Margolin, Jean-Claude, 14 “marital struggle for authority” motif: The Henpecked Husband (Twelve Proverbs, Wierix) and, 101–4, 101fig.; Husband Surrendering His Breeches to His Wife (1555 woodcut), 103, 104 fig.; “wearing the pants in the family,” 120 Marnix van St. Aldegonde, Philips van, 119 Massys, Cornelis, 89, 212n25 Master E.S.: Ornamental Foliage with the Struggle for the Breeches, 125fig. Master of Alkmaar, 49 Master of the Banderoles: Struggle for the Breeches (engraving), 120–22, 121fig. Master of the Housebook, 101 Meadow, Mark, 5, 37 Meckenem, Israhel van: King David with Prov­erbial Sayings from the Psalms, 22–24, 25fig. mendicants, antipathy toward, 106–9, 107fig., 116–17, 196n77, 196n79 Mendoza, Mencia de, 49–50 Metken, Sigrid, 139, 141, 145, 201n1 Mieder, Wolfgang, 144 Mijl, Abraham Van der. See Mylius, Abraham (Abraham Van der Mijl) “Mirror of Princes,” 22 The Misanthrope (Bruegel the Elder), 4, 81, 86, 87, 88fig., 148, 188n10

233

The Misanthrope (Twelve Proverbs, Wierix), 86–88, 87fig. misericord carving, 21, 23fig., 28, 189n12 mock New Year’s prognostications, 104, 128–29 mock towns, 154–55, 213nn37,43 “monkey” motif, 102 Montaigne, Michel de, 1, 8 Morales, Ambrosio de, 41–43 More, Thomas: Utopia, 142–43, 154 Morillon, Maximilien, 51 morris dance, 124 Mostaert, Gillis: Haywain paintings, 54 fig., 55fig., 61, 147 Murner, Thomas: Der schelman zunft (Guild of Rascals), 24; Narrenbeschwörung (Exorcism of Fools), 24 “musician” motif, 95fig., 96fig., 177n2494– 95, 183n89, 190n27 Mylius, Abraham (Abraham van der Mijl), 16–17 Netherlandish language, 13–17, 32, 163n73, 166n105 Netherlandish Proverbs (Bruegel the Elder), 1–3, 2fig., 3fig., 5, 19, 20fig., 21, 23, 71, 96fig., 150fig., 152fig.; categories of proverb images and, 149–56; Hogenberg’s Blau Huicke and, 35–37, 86–87, 134; proverbs as subject matter and, 1–4, 5, 21, 23; Wierix’s Twelve Proverbs and, 88–96, 96fig. Netherlandish Proverbs (follower of Sebastian Vrancx), 74 fig., 75fig. Netherlandish rhetoricians. See rederijkers (Netherlandish rhetoricians) Netherlandish tapestries: inspired by Bosch, 50–55; Various Proverbs (Gardner Museum fragment), 27, 28fig., 146 New Yorker cartoons, 144 Nicoló, Nelli, 211n16 Noirot, Jean, 70 Noot, Jan van der, 16 Obelkevich, James, 4–5 On the Misery of the Human Condition (Pope Innocent III), 102 Ortelius, Abraham, 113 Our Lady at Aarschot, Belgium, 21, 23fig. Ovid, 206n60

234

painted-glass panels, 27, 170n40 paremiologist, 5 Patinir, Joachim, 27–28 Pauli, Johannes: Schimpf und Ernst, 103 “peacemaker” (peys maecker), 127–28 The Peony Chamber of Malines, 33, 35 Petrarch, 7 Philip II, king of Spain, 49 Pigler, Andreas, 120 pilaarbijter (“pillar biter”), 1, 3fig., 81, 85fig. “pilgrim” motif, 46, 48fig., 49 Pizan, Christine de, 102 Plano, Arnao del, 50 Plantin, Christophe, 12, 36 Plompardije (mock country), 154 Poederoijen (mock town), 154, 213n37 poëtijckelijke puncten (poetical pageants), 109 political cartoons, 144–45 Pourbus the Elder, Frans, 147; It Is All Hay (1575 drawing), 65–67, 66fig. Prado triptych by Bosch. See Haywain (Bosch triptych) Priapea (ancient poems), 130–31 Priapus (god), 130–33, 132fig., 205n52, 206n56, 207n61 “proverb country”: Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs and, 1–3, 2fig., 3fig., 20fig., 35– 37, 150–54; Hogenberg’s Die Blau Huicke and, 35–37, 36fig. proverbe dramatique, 144 proverbe en action, 71 Proverbes en rimes (Proverbs in Rhymes), 21–22, 24 fig. Proverbia Communia (Common Proverbs; 1480 Netherlandish collection), 11, 32, 163n70 proverbial phrases, 4–5 proverbs: association with Bruegel, 1–4; categories of images of, 146–56; charac­ terization of, 4–6, 9–10; early depictions of, 21–30; Erasmus’s Adages and, 9–11; form vs. meaning in, 18–20; Greek and Latin collections of, 6–11; rederijkers and, 30–38; relationship between emblems and, 109–11, 198n100; survival of, 5–6, 142–46; vernacular collections of, 11–17 Proverbs on Sloth (anonymous), 146, 151fig. proverb tapestries, 27, 28fig.

index

Rabelais, François, 19, 108, 153, 154, 212n33 Randall, Lilian M. C., 168n20 R & K Hours (Netherlandish book of hours), 21, 22fig., 28 rebuses, 29–30, 31fig. rederijker kamers (chambers of rhetoric), 30– 32, 109–10 rederijkers (Netherlandish rhetoricians), 30– 36, 109–10. See also Castelein, Mathias de; Everaert, Cornelis; Gheurtsz, Reyer; Haecht, Willem van referein (poetic form), 33, 90, 104, 107, 108, 128, 173n81, 193n55 “relations between the sexes” motif, 56, 120; good marriages and, 193n55; The Hay Chasing the Horse (Twelve Proverbs, Wierix) and, 98–101, 100fig.; The Henpecked Hus­ band (Twelve Proverbs, Wierix) and, 101– 4, 101fig.; Husband Surrendering His Breeches to His Wife (1555 woodcut), 103, 104 fig.; Peddler Seated by the Bride (Twelve Proverbs, Wierix), 104–6, 105fig.; seduc­ tion and, 44–46, 45fig. See also Battle for the Breeches motif; entries at Struggle for the Breeches Robertet, Jacques, 27 Roman de la Rose, 122 Roovere, Anthonis de, 33, 89 Rörich, Lutz, 120 Rudy, Kathryn, 21, 168n21 Sachs, Hans: carnival play by (1553), 103; Das weib jagt den man int hel (1551), 103 Sacred Prepuce relic in Antwerp, 132, 207n69 Sambucus, Johannes: Emblemata, 111–12 Sartorius, Johannes, 11, 106 Sawyer, John F. A., 118 Schama, Simon, 32 schandpaal (shame post), 95 Schedel, Hartmann, 122–24 “seduction” motif, 44–46, 45fig. seven desperate women. See Battle for the Breeches motif Seven Women beneath the Breeches (lead badge), 125, 126fig. Seven Works of Mercy (Master of Alkmaar), 49

index

Shakespeare, 7, 143 Sigüenza, José de, 40–41, 46 Sincerus, Judocus, 133 Smet, Dierick de: Al Hoy (play), 73 Solomon, King, 6, 7 –8 Solomon and Marcolphus (folk book), 7, 119–20 Speculum Christiani (religious treatise), 45 Spenser, Edmund: Faerie Queene, 7 Spieghel, Hendrick Laurensz, 32 spinning, 182n74, 183n83 Stanhope, Philip Dormer, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, 143, 209n5 Steen, Jan, 144 Stijevoort, Jan van, 60 Struggle for the Breeches (Brun engraving), 128fig., 129 Struggle for the Breeches (engraving after de Vos), 129–30, 129fig., 133 Struggle for the Breeches (Florentine School engraving), 122–24, 123fig. Struggle for the Breeches (Frans Hogenberg), 126–30, 127fig., 129–30 Struggle for the Breeches (Master of the Bande­ roles), 120–22, 121fig. Susenbrotus, Joannes, 4 Swift, Jonathan: A Complete Collection of Polite and Ingenious Conversation, 143–44 tafelspelen (banquet plays), 73, 74, 97, 103 Taylor, Archer, 5, 159n25 “thief ” motif, 86–88, 87fig., 189n14 Three Fools of the Violieren Chamber, Antwerp (1561), 33–35, 34 fig. Thurber, James, 167n14 Till Eulenspiegel (folk book), 18–19 “to sit by the bride,” 105–6, 105fig. Tree of Fertility fresco (Massa Marittima, Tuscany), 202n21 Triumph of Love (tapestry after Petrarch), 43, 44 fig.’ Triumphs of Petrarch, 43, 44 fig. “turnip” (rapen) motif, 58–62, 59fig., 74, 75–77, 147, 182n76, 182n81, 183n87, 184n91 Twelve Proverbs (paintings by Bruegel the Elder), 3–4, 27, 29fig., 81, 85fig. Twelve Proverbs (print series by Wierix), 80–109, 82fig.- 83fig.; Archer Shooting All

235

His Arrows, 91–92, 92fig., 115; Begging at the Deaf Man’s Door, 106–9, 107fig., 116–17; The Blind Leading the Blind, 88–90, 89fig., 112; Bruegel and, 80–86; dating of, 108– 9, 199n104; de Bry’s Emblemata Saecularia and, 112–17, 114 fig., 115fig., 116fig.; Drunken Fool Seated on an Egg, 97–98, 97fig., 112, 192n41; Every Merchant Praises His Own Wares, 93–94, 93fig., 112; The Hay Chasing the Horse, 98–101, 100fig.; The Henpecked Husband, 101–4, 101fig.; interpretation of, 147–49; Man Playing the Jawbone, 94– 95, 95fig., 112; Man Warming Himself at a Neighbor’s Burning House, 90–91fig., 112; Man with Moneybags and Flatterers, 98, 99fig., 112, 115; The Misanthrope, 86–88, 87fig., 112; Peddler Seated by the Bride, 104–6, 105fig. Twe-spraack van de Nederduytsche letterkunst (Dialogue on Low German Literature), 32 Udemans, Cornelis: Verkeerde Werelt, 77–79, 78fig. Utopia (More), 142–43 Uytkerke (mock town), 154 Vandenbroeck, Paul, 52, 62, 77 “Vanden hopper hoeys” (“Of the Heap of Hay,” Netherlandish poem), 43, 63, 67 Vandommele, J. J. M, 109 Venne, Adriaen van de, 147, 149, 156, 187n131; Battle for the Breeches images, 135– 37, 136fig., 138fig., 140; Elck is om raepen uyt, 75, 76fig.; Elck treckt om’t langst, 75–76, 77fig.; greed symbolism in, 75–77, 79; Tafereel van de belachende Werelt (Tableau of the Laughable World), 135–37, 136fig., 140; Vassar college painting by, 135, 137–38, 138fig. Verbeeck, Jan, 189n12 Vergil, Polydore: Proverbiorum Libellus (Book of Proverbs), 9, 161n53 vernacular languages, 11–17 verwijfd (emasculated), 103–4 Vezeleer, Joris, 51 Villon, François: Ballade des proverbes, 8 Violieren Chamber of Antwerp, 31–32, 33–35, 34 fig., 70

236

Visions of St. Anthony tapestries, 51, 181n60 Vives, Juan Luis, 14, 49, 100, 166n108 Vogel, Martin, 168n19 Vos, Marten de, 114, 149; Struggle for the Breeches (engraving), 129fig., 130, 131, 133 Vrancx, Sebastian, 74, 145, 149 Der Vrouwen natuer (Netherlandish folk book), 122 “the walls have ears,” 39, 40fig. Warburg, Aby: battle for the breeches images and, 120–24, 125 Warnersen, Peter, 102; Gemeene Duytsche Spreckwoorden, 12–13 “wearing the pants in the family,” 103, 104 fig., 120. See also “relations between the sexes” motif

index

Werve, Jan van den: Het Tresoor der Duytsscher talen (The Treasury of the Netherlandish Lan­ guage), 16 Whitney, Geoffrey: A Choice of Emblemes, 109, 110fig., 112, 186n123 Wierix, Jan: Bruegel and, 80–86. See also Twelve Proverbs (print series by Wierix) women: power of, in Middle Ages, 194n59; in rederijker kamers, 172n68; sexual urges of, 203n24; undergarments of, 201n14 women contending for breeches. See Battle for the Breeches motif The World Feeds Many Fools (rebus painting, after 1550), 29–30, 31fig. Zeven quaey wijffs (seven bad women) in Herentals procession, 128

Designer:  Lia Tjandra Text:  10.5/15 Requiem Text Display:  Requiem Small Caps Compositor:  Integrated Composition Systems Indexer:  Marcia Carlson Printer and binder:  Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group